


Track This Thread

by rageprufrock



Series: Howling Commandos HQ [2]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-11
Updated: 2014-06-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 05:21:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1040826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rageprufrock/pseuds/rageprufrock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Even when Phil Coulson was doing something ridiculously, embarrassingly, crushingly human, he was still a flawless, seamless black box of a spook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Even when Phil Coulson was doing something ridiculously, embarrassingly, crushingly human, he was still a flawless, seamless black box of a spook. Whether he'd intended it or not, the handle "PC" essentially made him anonymous on the internet, lost in a cascade of technology review sites, blogs about "customizing your box" (what), and the odd tangent into political correctness, which is apparently no longer the politically correct word to use in order to discuss political correctness.

"It turned from categorization to mocking," Pepper explains, because despite the two certified geniuses with a half-dozen doctorates between them, a supercomputer artificial intelligence, an ex-Russian master spy stroke assassin and a living history textbook, she is still the only person who knows what the hell she's talking about. Ever.

"Oh," Clint says, feeling stupid and prickly and frustrated, pressure bottlenecking behind his eyes and feeding the low-grade headache he hasn't reported for the entire six months it's lived inside his skull.

Pepper tilts her head at him, considering, and asks, "Would it be helpful if JARVIS compiled a database or some kind of file of all of Phil's posts? On that forum?" 

Clint wants to say "no," because he doesn't like the idea of JARVIS combing through Coulson's hidden life's work. It still feels, sometimes, looking at the stack of pen-and-ink letters from all these online-only friends that Coulson had a fucking secret family, practiced bigamy in another state with 2.5 kids and a blond wife he saw when he was on sales trips — the whole nine God damn yards.  

He grits his teeth. "Yeah," he forces himself to say, because he's an adult, and for Coulson to have been a secret bigamist, he would have had to have any family at all. "Yes — that would be good." 

Pepper smiles tightly at him. "JARVIS?" she asks no one. 

"I'll be ready within the hour, Miss Potts, Mr. Barton," Stark's robot lover says to them.

Fuck this fucking building is so fucking creepy, Clint thinks. He says, "Thank you."

"Anytime, Clint," Pepper says. "And feel free to ask JARVIS for help whenever — if it's within his security parameters, he'll always try to assist."

Later, after JARVIS has interrupted Clint's shower to say that the file is available, Clint says, through the billowing clouds of steam and the sound of rushing water:

"No offense, buddy, but this shit is not right." 

JARVIS replies, "Mr. Stark assures me that people become accustomed to it. Mostly."

"Mostly," Clint echoes.

"Mostly," JARVIS repeats.

Clint's going say something else before he realizes he's about to start shit with a fucking computer and decides to slam his head against the shower wall a couple of times instead.

***

Clint recognizes obsessive behavior for what it is, and finds that reading all of Coulson's old Howling Commandos HQ correspondence (posts? what the fuck do you even call this stuff? there's a 35K plain text file just analyzing a series of four Cap posters released in 1946) — similar to watching a loved one sleep — gets boring as fuck real fast. 

It doesn't help that the content is weird, _so_ weird since Steve is either in a fifth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn near Franklin Ave., or two floors below Clint, depending on if you ask Steve or Tony. It's one thing to be uninterested because even though you had a fucked up past as a carney-turned-merc you are not weird enough to want to talk about the various depictions of Captain America's calves. It's another entirely to be _creeped the fuck out_ because Cap and his _actual_ calves are a routine part of your day. Every time Clint opens up the file JARVIS compiled, he has to hold back a reflexive wince and says a couple of "sorry, Steve"s like other people say "Hail Mary."

But he keeps reading through it, skims through all of the endless God damn threads of U.S. history infighting and every nerdgasm about new Cap documentary releases because in the midst of all this boring dreck, sometimes Coulson shows up — sometimes _Phil_ shows up.

JARVIS knows what he's doing, and every thread that gets compiled in the neatly navigable file is heavily trafficked by PC's commenting, but just because he's typing doesn't mean he's _there_. PC says a lot of stuff about the best places to find Cap memorabilia, makes a lot of politely firm but nonetheless extremely threatening comments about maintaining decorum, and neatly disputes any attempt of Bucky's to argue that Cap was never actually a member of the armed forces.

But sometimes, PC says something like, "deserts are the worst, I hate deserts," or "that you don't recognize the miracle and joy of gas station food is your own loss" or "I thought I told you all to shut up about this already," and Clint can hear _Coulson_. 

He hears Coulson's voice framed around some shitty remark or another, because Coulson boiled down to his essentials was relentless competence wrapped in well-tailored suits, saying something patiently, affectionately mean to someone else on the other end of a secured radio line. That constancy was — and Clint's aware of the utter fucking sadness of this — the best and least horrible kind of love Clint's ever known.

***

Despite Fury's willingness to give Clint access to weapons and release him into the wild during the Battle of New York, his asshole clenches right the hell up again once it's back to the course of ordinary business — or as ordinary as SHIELD ever gets. Like four seconds after Loki's been dispatched back to Asgard (again: _what_ ), Fury had been on Clint just like a fucking man, not taking no for an answer and hauling him into the still-smoldering helicarrier for the most intrusive debriefing of Clint's fucking life. 

It had taken a literal two weeks between the various SHIELD interrogators and representatives sent by the White House, DoD, UN, and World Security Council. Exhaustingly, Clint had to learn different fucking stories for each one, since the WSC's security clearance is different from the DoD is different from the UN is different from the White House. Unlike Coulson, Hill and Sitwell are nice enough to make him cheat sheets, and Clint resents this kindness because that's what his life's come to: wishing Coulson was still around to say shit like, "Barton, you can't imagine how unsympathetic I am to your plight." 

That's all before medical takes possession of him with the jealous insistence of the particularly crazy. There're standardized post-mission check ins, and Clint knows all these doctors, but even though he's been crazy forever, that had been baseline SHIELD standard batshit — post-Loki, Clint's in an entirely new class. 

"Were they this bad when you joined?" Clint asks Natasha.

"Stop whining," she tells him, but then two of the medical orderlies struggle past them with a massive, dusty piece of equipment, wires terminating in electrodes trailing the entire thing, headed directly toward Room B78, where Clint's 2:30 appointment is. She says, "Okay, maybe you can whine for five minutes."

"That machine warrants an hour of whining, minimum," Clint argues.

"Now you're down to four," she says, serene. 

Clint whines for four minutes. 

He also doesn't point out that she sits there in the demoralizing lobby of medical with him every time he has an appointment, that she waits through all of his forever-long tests, that she loops an arm through his and takes him off base, to dinner.

Because SHIELD only has enough emotional intelligence to be manipulative, not empathetic, Clint's been chipped and collared like a fucking dog. He has a half-mile maximum radius from SHIELD's midtown offices — an offensively ugly 1980s office building with a further 10 sublevels, three of which were the reason it took so long to get the 2nd Ave. subway construction underway — and if he strays beyond the invisible border, he gets three warning shocks directly to select neural clusters before someone hunts him down like an animal. He's so unexcited by this it's worrying.  

But midtown is only a wasteland for people not in the know, and Natasha hauls him off to Grand Sichuan, long after the local dribble of eaters has fallen away, and they spread half the menu out over three tables meant for a six-top. They order the starkly white and red _dan dan_ noodles, a massive earthen-colored mound of _dong po rou_ , _gan bian_ long beans, a bowl of _mapo_ tofu, swimming in fiery oil and sichuan peppercorns. They drink maybe a million gallons of shitty brown tea and don't talk about how, when Coulson brought them here, they always got something else in the teapot: a clear, beautiful pale yellow tea that smelled like flowers and was served with a tiny dish of rock sugar.

They go to Dylan's Candy Bar, after, because New York is sparkling dark and Clint can't go to any of the places he would rather be: his apartment, Natasha's apartment, Siberia, _back in time_.

"Are you okay?" she asks him, inspecting massive tubes of Jelly Belly flavors, examining every type of Twizzler ever made. She only likes the peel-apart kind because she's fucked up in ways that even the Red Room can't explain. 

Clint handles a bunch of the weird candy — there's some horrible-looking purple stuff from England that smells like perfume and regret even through the cellophane. "I'm okay," he says, because he is and it's true; there's really not any alternative.

Natasha arches an eyebrow at him. "Dr. Selvig was institutionalized."

"Just for a month. And he checked himself in, and that makes all the difference," Clint says, but he knows what she means, what she's implying.

Having Loki inside his head was like immolating for days that felt like separate eternities, turning into astral dust in the heart of a star. The tesseract is one of those things humans probably aren't meant to handle, that Asgardians fear, so what the hell is Earth doing with such an object, and Clint had been subsumed by it, filled up with it, felt himself go glowing blue from inside out — every doubt and independent thought cleared away into placid certainty. It had been easy, the easiest Clint's felt since he was old enough to remember: Barney and him hiding under the bed while their father went batshit downstairs, raving drunk; the cops transferring them over to foster care after telling them, hat in hand, their parents were dead; sleeping in the elephant trailer; Trickshot; Seoul, where he'd been freezing his nuts off in Gangnam before SHIELD had caught up to him and tranqed him into drooling, compliant oblivion. 

Clint's used to hard living. It's not the constancy of the grind that got him, but the sudden erasure of the fight, and he'd fallen straight down and out without the equal and opposite force holding him back, making him earn every inch. 

Natasha makes a considering noise. 

"Selvig was a civilian," he adds. Whatever else Clint is, he hasn't been a civilian in years. 

The look she gives him in reply is exquisite with patronizing sympathy. They each know the unsaid, about Clint storming the helicarrier and helping Loki murder his way across the globe — using all of his carefully honed and SHIELD-trained skills to lay down an unimpeded path. Clint had shot two-dozen people that day, on the helicarrier, and he doesn't miss, so Clint had killed two-dozen people that day. Clint's killed and forgotten a multiple or two of that in his life, but two-dozen people on the helicarrier aren't two-dozen people: it's Sonya from weapons R&D and Edison from payroll and Bei from Shut The Fuck Up, Barton, I'm Serious, Shut The Fuck Up, I'm So Sick Of You I Swear To Fuck — also known as the public information office. 

Clint's put arrows and bullets through the gullets and guts of a lot of people, for money, because it was either pull the trigger, or get a pauper's grave on the local municipality's dime. And Clint doesn't exactly _like_ SHIELD, but it rubs him the wrong way normal families are supposed to: constantly in his fucking business and always telling him what to do, trying to make him take vitamin D pills. At SHIELD Clint's taken out drug lords in Central America, despots in emerging African nations, at Nick Fury's pleasure, on Phil Coulson's orders — they're his kills but they aren't his fault, they aren't his call. Clint's shoulders were a lot lighter, before, for a little while, at least.

Only now he's carrying all these bricks and bodies again, because even though he can still feel Loki pulling the trigger it was the scarred pads of Clint's fingers on the bowstring, breaking shit. He was slit from stem to sternum but everything that spilled out was other people's secrets — the kind that got everybody fucking dead.

Natasha keeps telling him not to dwell, not to think about the how the bodies hit the ground, but even if Clint isn't looking for it the absence is everywhere. SHIELD's a big fuckall secret agency, but Clint's been there more than a decade. He can see where people have taken on two or three times the responsibility or coverage to make up for the holes, the desks that are still untouched and offices with their doors closed. Clint's not a spook and he's shitty at compartmentalization, and all of his coping mechanisms are off limits or dead or in Brooklyn, getting fat because Clint's neighbors keep fucking giving his dog all of their table scraps. 

"Norse demigods weren't covered in SHIELD intake," Natasha says, and she reaches for his hands, claws the crumpled-up Airheads out of his grip. 

"The Hulk is?" Clint snaps, and tries to take the Airheads back. "Stop that, I'm buying these."

She raps his knuckles, which sounds like a schoolmarm thing and would be if anybody other than the fucking Black Widow was doing it. When the Black Widow does it, it hurts like a motherfucker. "You have no money."

"I could have money," Clint lies. He has no money. SHIELD took his wallet along with whatever backdoor virginity he had during the first round of excruciating post-Loki debriefings, and in a staggering act of poor planning, all of his ditch-and-run stashes are outside of his max radius. In theory he could go rob petty cash, but Rhonda Hurley runs petty cash and she makes Clint lemon bars and presses papery-skin kisses to his temple every time he stops by to grab some rubles or turn in leftover rand. He also saw her stab some enemy agent in the fucking balls once with a letter opener, so.

"You have no money," Natasha repeats, and takes the Airheads away. 

But she does love him, in the complicated way Natasha loves people, so she buys him the Airheads and calls in a pick-up from where they're loitering in front of the California Pizza Kitchen like citybound teenagers. She signs the biometric transfers in the backseat of the SHIELD SUV — unmarked; the marked ones get stares now and are 100 percent for show — and they get the perfunctory sign-off for Clint to venture beyond his radius to Stark Tower, 65th floor.

Because out of all the incredibly damaged people Clint's met in his life, Tony's the most damaged and desperate for people to like him, the 65th floor is Clint's. It has an Olympic regulation archery stroke shooting range, a massive balcony with an infinity jacuzzi, three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, an entertainment suite, a chef's kitchen and either an office or an incredibly post-modern bondage dungeon. 

("Is this a bondage dungeon?" Clint had asked.

Tony had said, "Why? Do you want it to be? This is a judgment free zone, Katniss. If you're into that, then I'm into it for you — not with you, necessarily, but _for_ you — but no, seriously, if you want a full bondage dungeon I'm going to need some specs because there are a lot of super specific types and I could guess, but it would be more efficient if you narrowed the field." After some wordless staring, Tony had added, "I mean, if you want, I can go ahead and add a touch-activated stoplight system. That seems pretty universal."

Clint had said, "You know what? Nevermind.") 

Most of this is wasted on Clint, for whom the social status of "white trash" was aspirational much of his life. What he does like is the view — the breathless height at 65 stories up, with New York milling around in dots of light, little rivers moving in geometric flows, the glow of Grand Central, the dystopian wonderland of Times Square from above and at a distance. Clint doesn't curl up in any of the cleverly architectural corners that block the wind that roars this high up; he sits on the railings and lets it buffet him, whip him, a physical blow across his shoulders, the flat muscles of his thighs.

But Natasha follows him up to 65 tonight, instead of hopping off at 64 — where Tony has installed for her a special shoe closet, because Tony's understanding of women is apparently based entirely on movies and transactional relationships — and trails him to the balcony so the railing's out of the question tonight. Natasha lets him get away with a lot, but that would still get called in, and the last thing he needs is SHIELD psych putting him on suicide watch. Again.

"Tomorrow's the big day," she says to him, leaning into his side. 

Clint shrugs. "Could go either way."

"You're clear," Natasha tells him, with that certainty of hers that grounds him, makes Clint feel anchored in her surety. "This is just a formality."

Clint's white knuckling the brushed chrome of the railing; he's gritting his teeth. "Yeah, because they really cash in favors and fly Professor Xavier out for formalities." 

"You're important. They want to be sure," she replies, like that's that, and nothing more.  

*** 

Clint stays up until 4 a.m. reading Coulson's fucking forum posts instead of sleeping, so when he rolls up to SHIELD four hours later, his mood is somewhere between "poisonous" and "murder."  

Professor Xavier, who is waiting for him in the canteen, just smiles and offers him a cup of coffee. 

"Agent Barton," he says. 

"Ugh," Clint tells him, and takes the coffee. It's government coffee, so it's fucking terrible and leaves a sour taste in his mouth, but the addiction ritual is instantly soothing, and the pounding in Clint's head abates. Normally, he'd chalk it up to caffeine, but today, he narrows his eyes at Xavier. "Are you doing that?"

The professor's smile goes playful. "You're welcome."

"It is _so creepy_ when you do that," Clint tells him, because he'd be thinking it anyway, and Xavier reads peoples' minds constantly, unendingly, just all the damn time. Clint's had the uncomfortable opportunity to interact with the guy twice before, and it was always terrible: Clint instantly thinking of a laundry list of his deepest and most embarrassing secrets, and Xavier smiling at him with that all-knowing twinkle. _Awful_.

All around them, the other people milling around the SHIELD mess are either giving the table the most inconspicuous berth ever or Xavier's doing some freaksome mind control shit and disguising them. Neither option is comforting, but at least nobody's staring.

Xavier just leans back in his wheelchair, considering. "How are you doing, Agent Barton?" he asks.

Clint stares at him, genuinely blank for a beat, because the huge everything-ness of the question is hard to take. Medical asks him if he's been taking care of his stitches and his bruised ribs and tries to bully him into further CAT scans. Psyche operates strictly on a cognitive behavior level, parsing out discrete elements of his daily life, as any attempts to talk about the more nebulous, vast topic of "feelings" at SHIELD is less than useless. Security wants to know the details of how he broke in, what the plans were, to prevent anybody else ever infiltrating the helicarrier. Ops doesn't talk to Clint at all, on pain of death. Natasha doesn't waste her breath on what she already knows.

Instead of waiting for Clint to scrape together an answer, Xavier says, "Holding up better than I would have expected, I see."

"Could you at least _pretend_ you are not reading my mind?" Clint pleads.

"What would be the point?" Xavier replies, cheerful. "Agent Barton, I think a long way to go — "

"Thanks," Clint snaps.

" — but that insofar as your brush with Loki stands, you are without his influence," Xavier goes on. "I'll make my recommendations, and I imagine SHIELD will take the appropriate actions afterward."

Clint's come back from being in the shitter before with SHIELD. The year after he'd broke three different sets of direct orders from Soleymani, Sitwell, and worst of all, fucking Coulson to get Natasha, had been a hellish grind of keeping his mouth shut and eating it, whatever they dished out. He'd been pulled off of international ops and gotten some pretty tracking jewelry from one of the Level 4 agents, because intentional or otherwise another major component of his punishment was months of complete communications blackout from his previous primary handler. Clint sits in high places unmoving, in total silence, for infinite hours as his preferred day job, so the fucking emotional _ruin_ of suddenly getting Coulson's secretary when he called had come as an unwanted fucking surprise — a gash that went untreated and turned necrotic over the course of weeks, months, entire seasons, until he'd crawled his way back up the chain of command. He still remembers the way his knees had almost gone out from under him, the relief a physical thing, when Coulson had summoned Clint to his office.

"You've been surprisingly well-behaved," Coulson had said, leaning back against his desk, long legs stretched out in front of him, shoes gleaming. He'd been wearing a tie so darkly blue it looked black in the overhead lights, and Clint had stared at it instead of Coulson's face as he'd mumbled something to the affirmative. Coulson had motioned for Clint's right hand, saying, "Don't do this to me again, Barton," before he'd stroked a thumb over the seam of the bracelet and the metal halves fell apart.

It had felt crushingly intimate, so close with so little skin touching, but Clint had felt his mouth go dry and his eyes well up, his throat close as he nodded, because he didn't have words, and if he tried to say anything, it'd embarrass them both. But Coulson had known that, the way he knew everything, because he'd kept Clint's wrist tight in his own for about two minutes longer than he needed to, just running his thumb down the line of blue veins under pale skin, white from being kept indoors for months.

"I'm sorry you felt like you couldn't talk to me about this," Coulson had said, and he'd sounded so fucking _tired_ that Clint had looked up — at Coulson's worn expression and red eyes, capillaries burst.

Clint had blurted out, "You look like shit, sir."

Coulson had just given Clint's hand one last squeeze before saying, "I don't sleep that well when I can't lean on my best assets for cover in the field." 

And that had been the worst of it, the worst fucking part of his punishment: watching Coulson and filling in all the blanks, the shitty missions with second-tier sniper cover, the long weeks on assignment while worrying about bullshit back at home, worrying about Clint at headquarters. In the years they'd worked together Clint's stolen Coulson's coffee, broken into his office, changed his fucking ringtone to "Get Low" before Coulson had a senate committee meeting on intelligence spending, and otherwise generally pissed him off to astronomical levels — but Clint hadn't ever seen that look on Coulson's face before: exhausted, spent.

"I'll be good," Clint had promised, and he'd meant it, the way he'd meant it when he told Natasha, "I'll get you out — watch, I can do it, I promise." "I swear — I'll be good."

Clint's remembering the way that a smile folded away the tired wrinkles at the corners of Coulson's mouth, of his eyes, when Clint realizes he's taking this fucking trip down memory lane with Xavier still staring at him and he goes from gut-punched to _fucking furious_ faster than one of Stark's experimental cars.  

"Are you doing that?" he snarls. 

Xavier's expression is pitying. "You wandered there all on your own, Agent Barton."

Clint feels abruptly, completely nauseated. "How much did you see?" he croaks.

"All of it," Xavier says, but he says it nicely. Clint's distress must be going off like a siren. "But Agent Barton — I've seen secrets far, far worse than an undisclosed admiration." 

Clint closes his eyes. He asks, "Can I leave now?" and it hurts to get the words out of his throat. 

Xavier's barely said "yes" before Clint's shoving away from the table and bolting out of the mess.


	2. Chapter 2

Pepper finds him, six hours later, in the post modern office dungeon, curled up like a centipede around an iPad on either a terribly designed chair or an _abominably_ designed bed. Clint doesn't understand why, if Stark has money forever, everything he owns is so fucking clinical and awful to sit on or look at.

"Sorry to come unannounced," she tells him, and holds up a StarkTab. There is a giant purple bow on it and a tag that Clint can spy with his assassin's eyes says _GIRL ON FIRE, TRY THIS OUT FOR SIZE._ "I was informed if I didn't bring you one of these to replace your iPad, my head of R &D was going to fling himself off of a building." 

Clint stares. "Aren't you the CEO?" he asks, because his memories of Natasha's colorful, effusive complaints during her stint as Pepper's PA inform a vision of Pepper's schedule which barely leaves sufficient time for bathroom breaks, much less putting up with Tony's bullshit. Maybe Pepper has a time turner. 

"I am also — stupidly — dating Tony," she laughs, and motions at one of the leather...things. "Sorry I barged in — may I?" 

Clint waves a hand. "Go on — it's your apartment."

Pepper frowns at him. "Clint, it's _your_ apartment."  

"This building _literally_ has Stark's name on it," he reminds her, because he likes Pepper, ish, but a lot of times conversations with her give him flashbacks to his early run-ins with social workers. Well-intentioned rich ladies telling him they can fix his life have never actually managed to fix his life, and Clint's not really optimistic that having failed to address the more simplistic issues of his youth (needing to get a GED; stop getting arrested for petty theft; no more trick-rolling truckers), this method will work on his grown up problems (getting mindfucked by a demigod; killing a bunch of his coworkers; being in love with a dead guy). 

Thank God, Pepper doesn't press her hand to Clint's hand or try to pep talk him or anything awful, she just rolls her eyes.  

"You each have individual leases to your floors — and you would not believe the things Tony writes his name on that don't technically belong to him," she says, like this is normal for her now.  

Clint raises his eyebrows. "Stark doesn't own the building with STARK written on it?"

"For a number of tax reasons, a REIT spun off of Stark Industries owns the building; we're technically tenants," Pepper replies, and Clint's expression must be sufficiently horrified to stop her explanation dead in its tracks. "...But that's not what I came here to talk to you about."

Clint glances at the StarkTab. 

"I brought this because Tony would have whined all afternoon otherwise," she clarifies, tracking his gaze, before tossing it onto a nearby furniture-like object and turning her attention back to Clint, uncomfortably focused. "JARVIS says you're not sleeping."

Clint glares at the ceiling. Which stays silent, presumably out of artificial guilt.

"I know it's not my place to ask, really," Pepper goes on, twisting her hands together in her lap. She's wearing one of those suits that matches Coulson's closet: so gorgeously simple it can't possibly have cost as much as it did. "But I at least see Bruce and Steve and Natalie — well, I guess it's Natasha — around the common areas. This is the second time I've seen you since you moved into the building."

Clint says, "I'm fine," which sounds unconvincing coming from normal people and sounds just fucking embarrassing coming out of his mouth. 

Pepper stares at him some more before she says, "Okay, I can accept that."  

Coulson had drawn up an exhaustive 56 page briefing on Virginia Potts, Chief of Staff of Stark Industries Inc. (SI on the Dow; responsible single-handedly for the 6 percent drop in the DJIA the day Tony had gone on TV and said he was shutting down their weapons manufacturing business). He'd also put together a single page summary for everybody unlikely to possess the professional discipline to read the entire summary, and he'd said it while sliding the printer page directly across a conference room table at Clint. 

So Clint knows this: Virginia Potts graduated in the top 70th percentile of her high school class and went to Agnes Scott, where she majored in economics with a minor in business management. She'd spent the two years after that at the fixed-income desk at Lehman Brothers before she'd moved for a three-year stint to Hong Kong to become one of just a handful of women working on the prop desk at Standard Chartered. That lasted until Santander came sniffing after her, and she lasted in their head office for less than four months — "Gross sexual harassment," Coulson had summarized — before she'd packed it in for Goldman Sachs, where she spent a short lifetime until she had the misfortune of working a number of short term issuances with Stark Industries' then-treasurer. Over the course of three years, she left the MD track on Water Street and went to Stark, where she toiled in quiet obscurity for another five years before Tony managed to trap her in an elevator with him during a period where he was using Stark Industries' midtown headquarters for experimental infrastructure engineering. Six hours and a number of screaming matches audible through the steel doors of the elevator later, Tony had crawled out looking bamboozled, verklempt, a little slapped, and promptly stole Pepper for himself. He'd tried to get her named his personal assistant; the board had wisely ignored this in favor of creating a chief of staff position and letting Tony be someone else's problem. 

"And I will continue to accept that for another two months," Pepper goes on, because this a woman who has grit her teeth through four investment banks and years trailing Tony Stark in three-inch heels. "After which point, I will stop goaltending and let Tony come after you — understood?"

"You are exactly as mean I figured you'd have to be to keep Stark under control," Clint marvels at her, a little bit in love right now because his apparent weakness for assholes is gender indiscriminate.

Pepper smiles. "Thank you," she tells him, and rises to her feet, towering in a pair of strappy gray shoes that could double as torture devices. She nods at the StarkTab. "You should try it — I'm gathering feedback on how nonintuitive it is so I can crush the operating system before Tony tries to push it into production."

Clint laughs, surprising himself, and Pepper grins back.

"Seriously, be vicious," she invites. "I can already imagine the Gizmodo takedown otherwise." 

Being vicious about the StarkTab operating system is pretty easy because while it doesn't require a command line prompt, it's wildly overcomplicated for anybody whose brain doesn't operate like Tony's. Most of the menus are transparent and poorly labeled, and while the whole thing is pretty zippy it takes Clint almost an hour to figure out how to get his email imported onto the thing — a thankless exercise in the end since the top of his fucking inbox is an email from Fury. There's no body to the note, just "0600" written in the subject line, because Fury's a dick who doesn't get a lot of sleep, and likes to punish everybody else around him for his shitty life choices.

Pepper said two more months, so Clint figures he'll socialize maybe in a month and 29 days. For now, he unearths one of his stash of sweet and sour chicken MREs — flagrantly stolen out of a SHIELD supply warehouse — and settles in. The furniture is fucking awful and no matter what Pepper says, if she can get through the front door without having to pick a lock or get Clint's attention first, it's not his apartment. 

But if his options are a windowless room at headquarters or a holding cell in the helicarrier or here, Clint chooses here. And right now, he closes his eyes and presses the heels of his hands into the sockets, sinking into the pressure and weight, seeing and not seeing the borealis of non-colors underneath his eyelids.

***

He writes Stark 22 single-side pages in dull and duller and unreadably smeared pencil across yellow legal paper. It's more or less all one incredibly long run-on sentence, and there's a five-page section where Clint starts every sentence with the phrase, "So, like," followed by feelings words about the user design, because the mandatory workplace sessions about open communication have to come in useful _somewhere_. He leaves his commentary folded into a monstrous paper airplane with zero aerodynamic qualities, beaching it on the the common area breakfast counter with FOR STARK RE: YOUR IPAD KNOCKOFF written on a clear space on one of the wings.  

By the time he finishes all of this, Clint looks up at the clock and finds it's almost 2 a.m. It leaves him trying not to feel too grateful that he only has two more hours to kill before he can justify heading out for his meeting. 

On some level he knows this is sad, this is the person SHIELD found in a ditch in Seoul before they built him up to be Clint Barton instead of just Hawkeye, but he's tired, he can feel pieces of himself breaking off. He's managed to contain himself underneath his fraying skin, and for the moment, this is the very best he's going to be able to do.

***

Fury has a rotating cast of six assistants, all of whom have security clearances high enough they have nullify clauses in their employment contracts. Most field agents beyond L5 and all administrative agents have the rider attached to the shitty photocopies with information about SHIELD's loose interpretation of the Family Medical Leave Act, dollar for dollar (up to 5 percent) 401(k) matching contributions and standard verbiage about nondiscrimination in hiring or promotion based on gender, age, race or sexual orientation. Oh by the way, if you ever fall into enemy hands and your successful retrieval is deemed impossible you'll be assassinated by one of our own to prevent what you know from getting into the intelligence community. Also, see Suha Chaterjee in HR to sign up for a seminar on how to quit smoking and lower your monthly insurance premium. 

Assistant No. 2 — male, Nigerian, hopeless crush on Sitwell — is parked in front of Fury's absurd office with an industrial sized Sharpie redacting something. 

"Hey...you," Clint says feebly. 

Clint thinks he sounds normal; he's wearing jeans and a women's gray hoodie, because his life is embarrassing and he's been reduced to stealing Natasha's clothes. He can tell from Assistant No. 2's unimpressed expression it doesn't fit right, which means he's going to get his ass beat for stretching it out of shape later, too.

"You still can't pronounce my name, can you?" Assistant No. 2 asks, after a long beat.

"You have like five names," Clint pleads, because Assistant No. 2 knows full fucking well that Clint's so bad at sounding out names that it goes straight from pathetic into offensive. The first week Fury stole Assistant No. 2 from the DoD's analyst program for SHIELD Perry from HR was in near literal tears trying to get the kid's details into the internal systems so he could get paid and get enrolled for dental. 

"Barton, stop letting my fucking assistants troll you and get your stupid ass in here," Fury roars from inside his office, and Assistant No. 2 smirks and goes back to redacting who the hell knows what as Clint slinks inside, hands stuffed into his pockets. 

He's barely finished saying, "Sir — " when Fury cuts in with:

"What the _actual fuck_ are you wearing, Barton?"

Clint says, "Uh, clothes?" 

Fury looks, briefly, like he wishes he could stab out his other eye. "Barton, are we not paying you enough?"

"Actually, since I'm on suspension I think you're not paying me at all right now," Clint says helpfully, because Suha had bullied him into taking a bunch of long-overdue financial literacy classes during lunch breaks at SHIELD and he has a budget and everything now. Admittedly she'd done it because Coulson was a fucking narc to the bones and emailed her to say Clint had bought a semi-condemned building in BedStuy.

"So you've resorted to hustling in the interim," Fury guesses.

Clint flings himself down into one of the leather guest chairs. There's no thrill to Fury accusing him of looking like a prostitute, he thinks. "What did you want to see me about, sir?" he asks, instead of asking if he wants the price list, which had been great, _so_ great, because it had made Coulson _grin_ that one time.  

Fury moves like he's arming a weapon, his arms levering him out of his desk chair like he's taking the safety off of a gun. The leather duster's tossed over a low bookshelf, but the effect's still there as Fury stalks around his desk so he can get in Clint's face in a more literal, aggressive sense of the phrase.

"Xavier says you're clear — are you clear, Barton?" he asks. 

Clint's mouth goes dry, and he defaults to autopilot. "That's not up to me, sir."

"Bullshit," Fury spits. "All of this — " he waves at a pile of papers on his desk " — all the reviews and Xavier and everything is just a dog and fucking pony show. The only person who is going to really _know_ is you." He stares at Clint hard, scowling. "So I am asking you, Agent Clinton Francis Barton: _are you clear?_ "

A couple of years back, on an op that had gone whiskey-tango about two months in, Clint had gotten dosed with some fucked up truth serum and Coulson had been pulled off of general field operations to come pluck his ass out of dodge. The extraction had gone okay, for the most part, but the military transpo back to a U.S. base in Germany had been excruciating: all the comforts of running the gauntlet at the New Orleans Saints' rookie camp and the object of at least half of Clint's most mortifying secrets hovering over him like a nanny goat in a Brioni suit. 

Fury has the same effect: that drugging undertow that makes it next to impossible to lie to him, and Clint just stares into Fury's good eye like he's being hypnotized by a python and mumbles:

"I'm all alone in here." 

But Fury's not Coulson, so he doesn't dole out a steady supply of Trident to keep Clint's mouth occupied and not talking. He doesn't put in earplugs with exonerating certainty and go back to a stack of reports in his lap. Fury keeps his gaze fixed on Clint's face, in the near middle distance, until the silence has welled up into something muffling and uncomfortable, and then he waits another half minute before saying:

"Good — report to medical. Let's get that fucking chip out of you, it's a God damn field liability."

***

Clint feels bruised and fragile by the time medical is done with him; he steals a fleece jacket from ops supplies for someone about Thor-sized, and huddles in it.  

The tracking bracelet had been removed by one nondescript security officer or another — there has been a recent influx of West Coast transfers and new hires; Clint tries not to think about why — but the chip had been a literal pain. The whole process had involved localized anesthesia, two nurses, and a neurosurgeon, because SHIELD likes to put chips in places where self-administered extraction is likely to result in paralysis. By the time the medical glue had dried and everything had been patched up, a probie agent had dropped by with Clint's SHIELD-issue phone (hideous), Clint's personal mobile (worse), and everything he'd been carrying when they'd taken him in for debriefing and evaluation ($3.67, two sticks of gum, his housekeys, a Captain America keyring he'd seen in a random shit store and bought because he's fucking pathetic, and a six year-old condom). The probie agent's expression had been telling.

"Fucking _what_ , agent?" Clint snaps, because fuck it, he's old and senior enough.

The kid looks meaningfully at the condom. "Nothing." Long pause. "Sir."

Clint mutters, "You have gotta be shitting me," under his breath because he doesn't have to put up with getting sassed by fucking _probies._

He hangs around HQ long enough to stop by his locker and collect a few things: watch, wallet, Swiss Army Knife. He stuffs a few shirts and jeans into the crumpled up duffle bag at the bottom of the unit, and swaps the purple Chucks crammed into the corner of the locker for his combat boots. There's other stuff in here, too, little pieces left over from Clint getting too comfortable, and the locker looks lived in in a way that sometimes his apartment doesn't. There's a crinkling old A section of the Financial Times lining the top shelf that has an inadvertent picture of Natasha in the background of a G8 conference, pulling her hair into a bun while Clint holds her purse like a henpecked husband. There's a bunch of fading clutch-and-grin Polaroids of random strangers from a brief undercover gig as a wedding photographer, and there's a classic one of Sitwell in a bad suit trying to get Melinda Mei to do the electric slide with him. He's got ratty books including — fuck — something literally a year overdue from the Brooklyn Public Library, and for reasons currently inexplicable, a half-dozen rolled up copies of People Magazine, curled together in the back behind a bunch of wrist guards and tape.

This has been his locker at SHIELD for the entire time Clint's worked for them. It was the third thing they'd ever given him, after an ID code and a standard recovery chip under his right collarbone. Clint doesn't remember who it was that showed him to the locker, but he remembers the way he'd searched every Duane Reade and bodega in the city for _just_ the right lock, torn between the purple combo or the more classic side-code gold. Much younger and a little bit dumber, this locker had been the first sign of something more permanent, and Clint had loved it in a way that bordered on obsession.

He doesn't know when he lost the reverence — or maybe he just chilled the fuck out — when he _chilled the fuck out_ , but it's strange now to be standing in front of years of accrued, overlooked certainty in the wake of fucking everything up and missing the person he was when he threw that fucking book in here and forgot about it for months. 

"Fuck," Clint says, to nobody, and shuts the locker door too hard.

Outside of the carefully curated radius around SHIELD, Manhattan looks like Shanghai in 1998: cranes and construction dust pluming everywhere, floodlights overhead long into the night. He walks because the 456 has been shittier than ever since the Battle of New York, and between Natasha's hoodie and the SHIELD fleece, he's good in the October air. 

But even catastrophic alien attack and the slow cleanup hasn't kept fall out of the city, and every sidewalk is slicked with rain, blackened from it, with orange and yellow leaves decoupaged onto the cement and clustering in the gutter pools. Clint's walking toward Lower Manhattan, and the streets are as empty as they ever get at 8 p.m.: moderately, without the usual influx of tourists who are wandering around the fucking island trying to find bouquets of freshly sharpened pencils. 

He stays on Lexington, which has opened up for traffic and people, unlike Park, which is still a hot goddamn mess of construction and road crews. The worst of the debris has all been moved to a barge parked off of the harbor, with architects picking through the rubble to see what can be repaired and repurposed — the large scale version of gluing a mug back together, only the mug is Grand Central. This far east, he misses the worst of Times Square, and hefts his duffle a bit higher when he hits Murray Hill. On 28th he ducks into Kalustyan's to buy their biggest tub of baba ghanoush and some pita and doesn't think about how the first time he'd been here he'd been stalking Coulson through the city, curious about his new handler.  

He closes the 14 blocks between him and Union Square, and gives as wide a berth as you ever can to the streams of people flowing into and out of the Forever 21, the Strawberry, the DSW, the square — flanked by their drum circles. He looks at the Doomsday Clock, holding steady at its May 3 number, and Clint thinks how fucking weird it is to be living in a city filled with real and pseudointellectuals and not have anybody see to realize the strangeness of that. It's October; thousands are dead; Earth is not alone. 

The L into Brooklyn is a fucking nightmare because it's always a fucking nightmare, and the occupants in the last car split themselves into three primary groups: yuppies who aren't looking at Clint; hipsters who aren't looking at Clint, and people who are staring at Clint's arms. The only people who ever try to cruise him on the train are looking for something a lot more fucked up than Clint wants to offer, though, so he just zones out reading his year-overdue copy of — what the hell is this? Clint flips around for the title card, because of course he's lost the plasticky cover, and finds out he's ready something called _To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever_ , about basketball and the south, which are two things he has less than zero interest in.

There's a steady drizzle by the time Clint's tripping up the front steps to his building, and he sees a dumb leak and that the paint's a little fucked. Screw Katie-Kate; Clint's great at landlords, and he makes a note to write that shit down on his hand when he finds a pen and after he gets his dog. 

He has to swear for a little while before his housekey works, and then he has to swear some more when he swings the door to his apartment open and the first thing he gets is a fucking skillet to the face.

"Mother _fuck_ ," Clint says, and he goes down like a sack of potatoes in a way that is fucking _embarrassing_ because all things even he's supposed to be a fucking _superspy_.  

Kate says, "Oh, shit," and Lucky fucking helpfully steps all over Clint's crotch so he can lick effusively, tenderly at Clint's throbbing face.

***

Two hours later, the neighbors have brought him, in order: some tuna noodle casserole, a bunch of newspaper cutouts of him making stupid God damn faces in the middle of the Battle of New York, whatever leftover bodega dog stuff they've been buying Lucky, and some aspirin because Clint doesn't have any aspirin, okay, shut up Kate. 

"You didn't buy any aspirin, either," Clint mutters, in between spoonfuls of room temperature tuna casserole. It's really not as bad as Kate's expression is telegraphing.

Lucky, head more or less glued to Clint's knee, fat ass happily parked on Clint's Chuck, makes a wuffing noise, and drools some. Clint guesses this means the fat bastard is glad Clint's back — although as soon as Kate clears out and he runs out of this fucking terrible-looking high end brown rice and soy protein diet, Lucky's going right back on normal dog dog food. Nine years old, spoiled rotten, and trying to make Clint's dog uppity.

"I did not need aspirin," Kate retorts, holding a sock full of ice cubes — from 2D's freezer, because Clint's freezer has two plastic Bennett's bottles of vodka in it — to his cheek and punching him in the arm at the same time. "Unlike some people who live in unmedicated squalor, blind to the wonders of modern science and pharmacology." 

"I wouldn't need aspirin if you didn't _hit me in the face with a pan_ ," Clint complains, and asks, "Why the hell are you squatting here, anyway?"

Kate's face smooths out into expressionless serenity, which is how Clint always knows she's really upset about something, but that he's not going to get it out of her. Clint used to think the way Natasha could shut down the emotional discourse was a spy thing, and now that he's got upstart baby archer girls in his life, he thinks it's a lady thing. Maybe it's a terrible learned skill, like Clint knows how not to get eaten by lions and stuff, something ingrained for survival, but it still pisses him off that Kate scams him into talking about all sorts of stuff by confusing him with alternate yelling and touching his face with her hands, worried.  

"Your stupid aliens — "

"They were Loki's aliens," Clint interrupts. 

" — destroyed my entire block," Kate goes on, blithe. "And when I came over to yell at you about it you weren't here and your neighbors said you hadn't called about Lucky, so obviously I decided to wait here until you got back so I could kick your ass." 

There's a lot there she's not saying, about her destroyed block and why she came, but all of the questions Clint wants to ask about if she's okay, if she was scared, why did she stay here and wait for him? sound dumb inside the echo chamber of his own head. Clint's used to being dumb in the echo chamber of his own head but he hates hearing it filling up the air around him. He just swallows back the questions with a mouthful of tuna and says:

"That wasn't my ass you kicked when I came in the door."

Kate cocks an eyebrow. "Oh, really? I can never tell the difference."

He'd get mad at her but it's not even the worst thing she's said to him since she hit him in the head with his own skillet, so Clint says, "whatever" and starts searching around for his remote because he remembers there being like, seven episodes of Dog Cops on his DVR he'd been saving. 

Clint's finishing up the casserole while Mr. Whiskers makes his grand reentry onto the scene like the drama queen he is when out of the blue _Kate starts crying_.  

"Oh, God, why? What are you doing?" Clint begs, already at begging, knee-jerk. 

She seizes him by the collar of his tshirt and and drags him over to cry on, shoulders shaking, hands still fisted in the fabric, and Clint arches his back so they're not touching too much and tries to pat her head only he's holding the casserole dish with one hand and a fork in the other. This is pretty much about as successful as any other time a girl cried on him, which even Clint knows is sad.

"I thought you were _dead_ ," she says, after forever — after like six years of crying. 

Clint stares at the top of her head, at her greasy hair, and thinks that he's never seen her hair greasy before, and that right now she must be a mess. "I — was on TV?"

"But you didn't _come back_ , you piece of shit," Kate yells into his chest, because her forehead is now glued to his shoulder. "I thought you were dead and I was going to have to take Lucky back to my house because you were dead and nobody would even tell me."

There's not a good answer to this because Kate's right. Clint's been almost dead a ton, and they don't call Kate. They usually don't even call Natasha, because nine out of ten times it was her who carried him like a fainting heroine out of warzones and into SHIELD medical swearing the entire time. And maybe SHIELD called Coulson, the times when Coulson hadn't listened to whatever happened to Clint over the two-way, and Clint can't even tell Kate that, don't worry, someone from SHIELD would have let her know because with Coulson dead, no one would. 

All Clint can say is, "I'm sorry, Katie-Kate — I'm sorry," and rest the side of his hand still carrying the casserole on the top of her greasy head, Lucky whining and worried on the floor. In the background, Dog Cops keeps playing, through the first act into the commercial, and Clint sits there holding a fork and a crying Hawkeye with a sock full of ice on his face and feels underwater, overwhelmed, completely at loose ends.

*** 

At 3 a.m., Clint finds himself in bed with a puffy-faced teenage girl, but hunched over a tablet and perving over someone else completely.  

He'd managed to get Kate to let go of him after another two episodes of Dog Cops had played through — this season is _terrible_ so far — and she'd taken a shower and stolen a bunch of clothes from him. Right now, she's curled up on the left side of his bed in a pair of sweatpants that has RIOT GRRLS written across the ass (Clint has no idea) and an Army Rangers tshirt Clint absolutely cannot look at, and not because it stretches weird across her tiny boobs. He doesn't know why he has it, how he got it, and really doesn't want to remember if he's ever jerked off in it.

She'd only been convinced to sleep if Clint stayed close enough for random punching ( _man_ , what is his life?), so he'd sat on the other side of the bed and felt like a creep. An hour into it, once her breathing had deepened and evened out and included at random intervals a hilariously piggy little snore, he'd gone and gotten his iPad and opened up that file JARVIS has been compiling.

He's skimming, mostly, at this point. 

Coulson never said anything about his job, although he mentions coworkers. Clint figures out that Coulson calls Maria Hill the Other Sad Bastard because there's a story in here, from a couple of years back, that's totally innocuous but completely memorable about the weekend she and Coulson got locked into a conference room together thanks to some tech update glitches. Sitwell's just nicknamed — affectionately — the Patsy Guy. Fury's "boss." There's some other passing mentions, and Clint had read and read and read to try and find himself, but Coulson doesn't talk about Arrow Guy, or Hawk Guy, or Fuckup Guy, or Ex Circus Guy at all — nothing Clint can figure might be him. He tries not to be pissed about this, but he doesn't try to hard. You shoot people in the face for a guy and bring him popsicles for _years_ and this is the bullshit you get. 

There's this continuing thread of a guy named Bucky and another troll called DumDum giving Coulson crap about an apparently stillborn office crush on someone named Pam. Aside from the mindblowing impossibility of Coulson having a _crush,_ it makes Clint even angrier in a way he doesn't have a right to be. But fuck Coulson, anyway, for the way nothing ever touched him, nothing got to him, nobody made a mark on him — he might have been a Captain America nerd and a person under his suits, but that was always under the suits. And it didn't matter how many times strike team delta had bled on each other, Coulson's ties and neatly buttoned cuffs had been the Rubicon, the uncrossable divide. Nothing in or out.

In the Congo, once, Coulson had given a live field transfusion to Clint with a semi-dirty catheter and some needles he'd stolen out of a first aid kit belonging to child traffickers. And how _fucking messed up is that_ — that Clint has Coulson's blood running through his veins and he can't figure out who _fucking Pam is?_ Clint remembers, just a little bit, the way Coulson had said, "Sit down, Barton," and shoved him into a chair, stripped off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves and ignored all of Clint's barely audible protests. He remembers their backup yelling at Coulson on the radio, and he remembers Coulson pulling out his comm — folding it into Clint's lax hand and saying, "Here, Barton, hold this for me." 

Clint had held that stupid comm in his fist for their remaining 34 miserable hours in the Congo. He'd clutched it as they'd been medivacced out, during his long convalescence in a hospital in Seoul, watching some baffling TV show about a family that owned a bathhouse where everybody was terrible at getting married, except they all got married, but they all still hung around the bathhouse driving each other insane.

"I wonder if this makes more sense if you know Korean," he'd asked nobody, really, just out loud at the room in general.

"Not as much as you'd think," Natasha had said, from where she was sitting cross-legged in the next bed picking at something underneath her wrist cast with a bowie knife. 

Coulson, spellbound, hadn't said anything, just stuffed some more chocolate-filled koala cookies in his mouth, and stared at the hospital monitor as bathhouse show faded into rival lady TV reporters show — which had promptly involved some kind of bus accident.

It wasn't until almost a month later, finally on their way back to the U.S. on a commercial Asiana flight that Clint had said, shy and quiet, "Uh, here, sir," and handed Coulson his comm. Coulson had smiled at him, a little, in that way that sometimes slipped out from underneath the perfect seams and hems of him, and said, "Thank you, Barton." He'd slipped it into his ear where it had sat, probably still warm from Clint's hand, and prompted one of the most Victorian erections Clint's ever had. 

For that entire period, there's only one post out of dozens from PC that's not strictly Captain America business, and it says: _Pam makes me nuts._

"Maybe he means Natasha," Clint mutters to himself, under his breath, which is such a terrible thought he scrolls to the bottom of the file to read backwards for a while, only he frowns when he realizes either the dates are wrong or JARVIS screwed up. 

There's stuff dated after. After May 4. And the flutter of hope that thrashes in Clint's throat only lasts long enough for him to double and triple check that none of the posts are by PC — just a glitch, then, Clint thinks, and grabs a pen — it's stolen from Bank of America; all of Clint's pens are stolen from banks. He writes "ASK JARVIS WHY BUSMONITOR POSTS??" up his wrist because "LANDLORD STUFF LEAK!! PAINT!!" and "GET SOME NORMAL DOG FOOD JESUS" is taking up all the space on his palm. 

At that point, Katie-Kate wakes up long enough to punch him in the hip until Clint says, "Jesus, _fine, fine!_ Stop hitting me!" and lies down to sleep. He thinks it's stupid. There's no way he's going to sleep at all. He thinks that seriously Hawkeye is the worst most spoiled brat, and then he doesn't think anything — just feeling Kate's palm flat over his chest, and the warm press of bedroom darkness, sweeping him away.


	3. Chapter 3

Clint wakes up because he gets that preternatural tingle, that dread crawling like ice down his spine that can only mean one thing. There are maybe 10 people in the world whose presence won't wake Clint up, and of that group, only one of them makes Clint's dick try to shrivel up back inside his body as a reflex response.

He pulls a pillow over his face and asks, "What do you want, Natasha?" 

She pulls the pillow off of his face. "You're lucky that when I found you in bed with a teenager her first reaction was to tell me you were too old and gross to bone."

Clint is obscurely hurt by that, because it's not like this is the first time Kate has expressed something to that effect, but still, that's mean. Clint's okay. He can get girls to let him touch their boobs. And with guys he does pretty good. For some definition of "pretty good," anyway. 

One time, Coulson had walked into Clint's apartment and found some high-gloss second-year medical resident named Misha slumming it, doing a line of coke off of Clint's SHIELD-issue tablet computer in the kitchen. All Coulson had done was stare blankly at Clint as he'd hopped around in his ratty boxers looking for pants and some dignity. Unhelpfully, Misha had taken one look at Coulson, another look at Clint, and turned back to Coulson to say, "Uh — he was saying your name the whole time?" 

"Your effort is appreciated, Mr. Carmichael," Coulson had said to the guy, which was the first Clint had heard of the Misha's last name. And turning back to where Clint was fighting a losing battle with a She-Ra tshirt, Coulson had added, "And get your ass moving before pick up leaves you here, Barton," and left.

Now, Clint just stays prone in the ruin of his bed while Natasha frowns at him. "Katie-Kate's like, a child, and a Hawkeye. It doesn't count."

"She's wearing your clothes," Natasha says. "Or, clothes that became yours after you stole them."

Clint squints at her. "Are those your RIOT GRRL sweatpants?"

"Worryingly, no," Natasha says, and reaches down to poke menacingly around the soft tissues of his throat with her deadly fingers. "Get up — your child Hawkeye is making coffee and you've been instructed to present yourself for daily check-in."

"You're _shitting me_ ," Clint groans, rolling himself up in the blankets like this burrito of sheets will protect him from SHIELD's invasive brand of bullshit. "They cleared me!"

At this point, Natasha busts out her nails, clawing the flat sheet and the blankets away from him with ruthless efficiency. "This is basically just standard report — they just want to see you in person because of obvious reasons."

Not that it makes anything better, given that standard report is only the single most hated SHIELD policy. There's nothing an organization of highly mission-driven personalities trained to operate successfully with little to no backup likes better than having to call in once a day just to let everybody know they haven't defected to an enemy state yet so far today. It's like taking angry, belligerent attendance.

"They probably want to stab me some more," Clint grumbles, but he hears the hiss of coffee in the next room and the happy clinks of Lucky's tags, the low murmur of a voice through the wall. This is what mornings are probably supposed to sound like for normal people with normal lives, with other normal people sharing their spaces and all the hours of their days. 

Natasha ruins the moment by throwing a pair of jeans in his face. 

Kate and Natasha do some psychic lady posturing over coffee. Clint doesn't know the details because penis, but he can tell they're sizing each other up, which involves a lot of looking at each other's boobs in a clinical, unexciting way. He doesn't even want to know. They're each sipping coffee angrily at each other with one of the two mugs Clint owns, so he's drinking out of the pot (again) and hoping neither of them zero their angry looks in on him (some more). 

"Clint calls you Hawkeye, too," Natasha starts, voice uninflected.

Clint puts down the coffee pot and covers his face with his hands. "Oh, God, Natasha."

Kate narrows her eyes. "I shoot okay."

"You like the glory — feeling like a hero?" Natasha continues, too casual, like she doesn't have an inch-thick dossier on Katherine Whatever Nutty Family Middle Name She's Rocking Bishop, recent graduate of Probably A Fancy Private School, future student of a Crazy Expensive Brick and Weed-Covered College who got real good with a bow and arrow. Clint doesn't know any of the fine print details of Katie-Kate — he knows the important stuff: that she took a hit and got up from it fucking furious, that she didn't realize she wasn't fitting in until it was too late to change anything. He puts up with her being on SHIELD's radar because he's the person who gets to track her on it. 

"I like being able to help people, period," Kate snaps. "I don't like being helpless."

Natasha lets this go without further comment, glancing down at her watch and back up at Clint to say, "Come on — we're going to be late," and then they're out on the street, in the suddenly cold autumn air, all the buildings shivering around them in the early morning light: watery gray.

"You okay that she's apparently just going to hang around your apartment like that?" Natasha asks, when Clint climbs into the passenger seat of the SHIELD-issue SUV. 

Clint shrugs. "Nothing worth stealing," he says, and as the Natasha puts the car into drive, because Clint is a dumbass, he blurts out, "Hey, do you know anybody at SHIELD called Pam?" 

***

Natasha doesn't know anybody named Pam. She makes him check in with Sitwell, who has dark, bruised smudges under his eyes. He says, "Barton — good to have you back with us," and he sounds like he means it. 

Sitwell looks horrible, wrung out. The entire time Clint's worked with SHIELD, the only person with fewer expressions than Coulson had been Sitwell, and it had probably made up the foundational levels of their inscrutable, diner-based friendship. Clint thinks that if this were a normal workplace, they'd talk about it, maybe put up some pictures, have some sort of remembrance ceremony — there're these massive ad hoc memorials flung up all over midtown these days: flowers and electric candles, office supply offerings littering the entryways and public floors of glass and steel buildings still showing their bones, still under repair. But SHIELD is used to losing people, and SHIELD agents are by proxy supposed to be used to losing each other, and even though this was death on a catastrophic, mindbending scale, everyone is still trying to operate as situation normal. 

Clint's no gauge of normal, healthy responses, but he knows this isn't it. SHIELD's still huge with silences, all the halls normally overflowing with people whittled down to a skeleton crew. Clint doesn't know if that's all the people who are left or if Fury and Hill have deployed personnel to other places in desperate need of resources, if the destabilizing event of the Battle of New York has spread the network ever thinner.

But maybe there should be a memorial, maybe there should be flowers and electric candles, and maybe Clint wants to leave a ceremonial offering of binder clips for Perry in HR, who's never going to cry about Assistant No. 2's name again, and Bei from public information. Maybe people need that; maybe they should do that here.

Out loud, Clint says, "Glad to be back, sir," because the alternative was being dead or still murdering people at Loki's direction.

Sitwell smirks at him. "Oh, I'm sure — you and Romanoff are wanted down in the third level briefing room — " and he holds up a hand against Natasha's protests " — nothing breaking, just some developing situations we'd like you to have preliminary intel on." 

So they go, down the steps into SL3, where they take the long way and admire the cavern of the 2nd Avenue Line being dug, visible through a massive concealed window someone had frivolously, charmingly commissioned when they'd shut down SL 4, 5, and fittingly 6. The experience of playing Hill's security attachment when she'd been trapped in a series of torturously redacted meetings with Joe Lhota and Mike Bloomberg had been pretty phenomenal. 

The sitrep is agonizingly normal. It's some mealy-faced recruit giving the rundown with appropriate slide accompaniment of some potential flare-ups. They're all standard and currently low-stakes enough that it's unlikely ever to wend its way up the ladder of escalating shitshows to qualify for SHIELD attention. Everything they pick up from government work is a catastrophe already in progress; most of the missions they initiate aren't any better, to be honest. One time, Clint and Natasha had gone on a milk run that _started_ in a North Korean prison camp.  

They're in the cluster of impromptu market stalls, built in the shadow of the Grand Central workzone, buying coffee and banana pudding from the Magnolia Bakery ("No lid — just put a spoon in it," Clint tells them, making grabby hands), when Stark calls.

"God, what do you want?" Natasha asks, which is how Clint knows it's Stark.

_Nice, that's real nice, Natalie Rushman, you lying liar who lies and spies_ , Clint can hear Tony say, tinny and argumentative coming out of Nat's phone. Her face is a vision of long-suffering disinterest. Clint still has the 300+ angry texts she'd sent him during her cover with Stark Industries as Pepper's assistant; they're a fantastic mix of "this is fucking bullshit why am I doing all of this these fucking draconian shoes" and Russian threats to punch fuck Stark with a rusty cross beam.  

"If you're calling to gossip, I have better things to do," Nat lies. Currently, she's fighting Clint for the banana pudding spoon.

Tony says something in reply, and the only bit of it Clint manages to hear is _Busmonitor._

*** 

Clint, for obvious reasons, missed a bunch of stuff immediately after the Battle of New York. But early in September, Stark had called and given probably the most deranged, rambling monologue Clint's ever heard outside of a supervillain lair, and concluded with, "Anyway, the point is, I'm calling to see if Fury would let you and Natasha come out to play because Stars and Strippers here — fucking _ow_ , Rogers!" 

What Steve wanted was to show them a letter he'd gotten, that he'd read like all the thousands and thousands of others, to lay the crinkled paper in Clint's shaking hands and ask, "You and Agent Romanoff knew him best — did you know about this?" 

And Clint had only managed to read so far as the line, "My name is David Lesinski; I'm writing to you about my friend, Phil Coulson," before he'd felt like someone had landed a punch directly in the solar plexus — suddenly breathless. 

All in all, Clint remembers too much about that day in Arlington. 

He kept his sunglasses on the entire time and wore his nicest suit. He'd put on one of the three ties that Coulson had knotted up for him, and that Clint kept loosened enough to slip over his head and hanging on his bathroom doorknob in BedStuy. It had felt like a lodestone around his neck the entire time, watching Sitwell and Fury put fucking Captain America merch around Coulson's grave, watching Skolimowski put down a clutch of blushing pink peonies. 

Clint remembers stupidly, vividly, running his fingers in the groove of the Latin Christian cross on the cool stone of Coulson's grave marker. He remembers thinking about Coulson saying, "Ish," when Clint had asked — perched high in the clearstory of a gothic cathedral with his scope lasered in on some bad guy or another — if he was religious. Clint remembers the way all those strangers — _Coulson's friends_ — had introduced themselves, laughed self-deprecatingly because they understood, it was sort of a nerdy hobby, it wasn't that weird Coulson wouldn't have told his coworkers. 

Clint remembers trying to read a letter to Coulson out loud, when it was his turn during the impromptu memorial, the way his tongue had gone useless over the name, "Phil," and how Banner had taken the letter away and carried on. 

And it's fucking _dumb_ to be sick about this, to be hurt like this still, but Clint's been called a dumbass by good and bad and wrong and right people his entire life. He's a dumbass, and he can't stop thinking about it, can't stop being sick about it. It's why he's forced himself to read seven years worth of Captain America fanboy bullshit and learned more about the interpersonal politics of the Howling Commandos HQ than any human being other than a Howling Commando needs to know.

This was part of Coulson's _life_. This stupid website and its dumb digital people had filled in all those empty spaces, those trailed off sentences about some new History Channel documentary Coulson had started and never bothered to finish, that two days he disappeared every time ComicCon was in town. Clint's always been a greedy fuck, would have hoarded all of Coulson's details like treasure and sat on top like an angry dragon if he could, and this was something Clint hadn't known at all, some huge secret that was so big and pervasive he'd overlooked it, missed how it was baked into the margins of every single conversation and interaction.

Clint keeps trying to see if that changes anything, alters the foundational embarrassments of his — what did Xavier call it, an "undisclosed admiration"? It doesn't. It just makes his stomach churn, something in his gut ache from looking at restaurant menus and into the windows of grocery stores. Those things on the other side aren't his to have, and neither were Coulson's secrets, but that doesn't make Clint any less hungry. He would have probably — okay, definitely — made fun of Coulson, but at least he would have known, he would have been able to poke Coulson in the shoulder and then Clint could hook his chin over Coulson's shoulder and ask snotty questions.

What's this forum? Are you its den mother? Who are these assholes? Why didn't you tell me about it? Has Rogers seen this? Have you figured out yet that I've decided to keep that vigilante that was running around shooting gray rapists in the face as a kind of angry apprentice? Who is Pam? Will you kiss me? Can I keep you? Do you want to meet my dog? Could you love me, if I tried really hard?  

***

"First things first," Stark says, when the elevator doors open out into the common room, "credit where credit is due: I wouldn't have figured this out at all if Robin of Loxley wasn't using JARVIS to creep on people."

Rogers, Banner and Natasha all stare at Clint.

Clint's reflexive responses all involve yelling " _fuck all you assholes_ " and leaving, so he ignores them and glares at Stark until Tony waves something imaginary away with his hand and adds: 

"Anyway, I called this meeting to discuss — " he snaps his fingers and an image pops up behind him, Howling Commandos HQ stretched out until it's the length of the common room windows " — this hot bottled mess of nerd sweat and patriotism." 

"Pepper says it's mostly a historical enthusiast website," Rogers says feebly. 

"Okay, sure, because whacking it to historical enthusiasm is better," Stark allows generously, and Rogers covers his face delicately with one massive hand. " _Anyway_ , back on point — we have an issue." Tony glances at the ceiling. "JARVIS, if you will?" 

Overhead, JARVIS chimes in with, "A pleasure, sir," and Clint's ass twitches at how fucking _unsettling_ it is to be reminded that (a) Stark's building can hold hours long conversations with people (b) Stark's building is about to hold an hours long conversation with Clint and (c) Stark's building has _definitely_ watched Clint take a dump, which implies a greater degree of intimacy than Clint's reached in his handful — okay, two real relationships.   

"When Agent Barton requested I compile a database of all of Agent Coulson's posts on the Howling Commandos HQ, I did so using two-dozen different search criteria," JARVIS tells them, drawing up and discarding various informational screens and algorithmic data as he goes. "Limiting collection to his official login comments turned out to be inadequate, as on occasion he posted either anonymously from a public computer terminal and signed off as PC, or did not identify himself at all."

Stark says, "Basically I think he was trolling his own forum."

"He was defusing potential arguments in the most politic way possible," JARVIS corrects. "As I have already explained to sir. Several times."

Tony mouths, _TROLLING_.

Clint digs his nails into the meaty part of his palm, and Natasha asks, "Is there a point to this, Stark?"

"It turned out the most efficient method of collecting Agent Coulson's posts were by doing a thorough analysis of his writing style, and running forum posts through to determine which matched," JARVIS carries on. "As you may have discovered by now, Agent Barton, this method picked up some unexpected comments." 

His mouth goes dry. "Uh — yeah. Yeah." Clint rubs a hand over his face so he doesn't have to look at the way Bruce's face is soft and sympathetic. "Stuff from some guy named Busmonitor."

"Ten points to Hufflepuff," Stark says, looking manic. "Now, originally, I thought that JARVIS had failed me, and that I would have to go crazy stage parent on him and hand-code a new algorithm to fulfill your creepy masturbatory Agent and Cap needs — " 

Clint gives Steve his best, most convincing pleading look. " _Totally_ not like that."

Steve's expression conveys that Clint's best, most convincing pleading look is not convincing. 

" — except then I realized JARVIS was right," Tony concludes with a flourish.

"I usually am, sir," JARVIS interjects, arch. 

"Not in front of company, dear," Stark ripostes, automatic, and pulls up another screen — and Clint sees Busmonitor posts scrolling next to ones from PC. Pieces of the text highlight, superimpose one another as Tony talks, and Clint can see the way the words overlap, that the cadence is a little too familiar as Tony says, "These guys are _way_ too fucking similar for this to be an accident. Tell me you guys are seeing this."

Clint does, he really does, because the next page is Busmonitor saying "I could fight you over this all day; I've already laid in a supply of Little Debbie," and if Clint Barton were any sort of delicate flower, he'd faint or falter. 

But he's had it sometimes literally beaten out of him, and all Clint does is get _pissed._

*** 

Clint thinks that one time, Coulson did — love him.

He goes over that moment at night sometimes, the way he presses his thumbs down on green and purple bruises, is forever running his tongue over the cuts inside his mouth after one bullshit brawl or another. It hurts, it fucking _hurts_ , but he thinks about it with the religious fervor of the converted — this is his tent in middle America, this is that sermon he can't stop hearing echo inside his head.

It had been late, ish, night sweeping over Varanasi and all the lights of Diwali scraping back against it, gleaming in the orange burn of tempered darkness. Clint remembers the sudden drop in the temperature, the way it had been a steady 85 degrees all God damn day, and how the heat had vanished like the continental shelf underfoot, and the chill had seeped in where it could between the huddled gush of people around the banks of the Ganges — lanterns floating in the water, in between the golden slivers of light. 

Clint remembers so perfectly, the steps down to the water, the thousands of candles lit in perfect ordered rows down them, the fireworks, the the lights strung up everywhere, and how he'd felt like the entire city was _gilded — golden._

The next part's not clear, the next bit, Clint's not sure about, because it feels like he was swimming in honey when he saw it, all the noises gone wobbly under water.

But he thinks he turned, and saw — for too long, for eons, a year, maybe 15 eternal seconds — Coulson looking at him like people look at women in black and white movies, like Clint had looked at the orange-warm windows of houses in suburban neighborhoods, miles away from the cold dirt of the circus tents. Backlit against the corona of lights gone up, Coulson's eyes had been dark and darkly sweet, and anybody else Clint's autonomic bodily responses would have moved his legs and hands, and he would have pressed his palms to the line of Coulson's jaw and drawn him in. 

Coulson was a man who was ruthlessly kind, whose fury and forgiveness came at once. Over the years he'd let Clint sleep in his office, take his stuff, steal his clothes, occupy his time with complete disregard for how every incursion he didn't fight was getting Clint a little deeper — and he'd done it with that _fucking look_ : patient, unhurried, like he would be there still waiting when Clint was ready to come in from the cold.

So Clint can feel the horrible swoop of his stomach, the disbelief that makes his throat hurt. Coulson wouldn't do this. He wouldn't be this cruel. 

Because even if it was only that once, for that accidental, infinite moment by the river while one million lights had been scraping away at the darkness, it had been real to Clint, and to let them — fuck it, to let _him_ grieve like is this is too awful, and the hope for what this might mean goes down like a coal in Clint's belly, so that the harder he clutches at it the worse it hurts. 


	4. Chapter 4

Once Banner, Stark, and Rogers conclude their three-way pissing match about It Figures That Fury Would Lie, Of _Course_ Fury Would Lie He's a Monster I Bet That Eyepatch Isn't Even Real and This Is Too Terrible to Lie About — Would He Really Lie About Something Like This? For So Long? all that's really left to do is _something_ , anything.

"Realistically, we don't have enough information to go on," Banner says, because even though he once wrecked Clint's long weekend by turning into a giant rage monster and destroying Harlem, he's still the most reasonable person at the table.

Tony looks mulish. "Are you casting aspersions upon JARVIS's analysis — because I really thought we had something going here, Jolly Green."

"Oh, God, don't say that," Banner says the same time Rogers sighs, "I learned from you guys suspicions about SHIELD are generally worth pursuing. The question is, how?" 

Natasha, who's spent as many years working for SHIELD as she worked against it, says, "Fury doesn't keep any of his most sensitive files on networked hard drives."

"Fury doesn't keep any of his most sensitive files digitally, they're in the White Plains administrative offices," Clint mumbles, feels it tumbling out of his mouth without thinking about it, and then when everybody stares at him with a question hanging in the air, he stutters, "Uh — Coulson used to tell me stuff."

Banner's eyebrows are nearly at his hairline. "About what I'm assuming is incredibly classified SHIELD infrastructure and procedure?"

There's a whole backstory here, about how years into Clint's tenure at SHIELD he was still barely fitting in and clinging onto his authorization by the skin of his teeth and the expedience of his aim. And how getting transferred under Phil Coulson's supervision had felt like just another chapter in Clint's epic fuck up of an existence until six months into the gig, Coulson had looked at him thoughtfully, and said, "I'm violently allergic to sulfa drugs — if you slipped me some, I'd slip into anaphylaxis and die without immediate medical treatment." 

"I...sir?" Clint had asked, because it was not an exaggeration to say the location of some of Coulson's _offices_ at various SHIELD locations were classified, much less medical shit.

"I trust you," had been Coulson's reply, said without hesitation, inflection or doubt. "I trust you, and I trust I can tell you things." 

It's how Clint knows about most of the stuff he knows about, and everything he shouldn't know about at all. Coulson used to drop those random secrets on him like river stones, weighing him down so he wouldn't come untethered. Clint never thought he was one for being tied down, but this wasn't handcuffs or unwanted debts — this was Coulson telling Clint something that could get Coulson killed, that could bring SHIELD down from the inside out, and where it should have been terrifying, the pressure had made it easier to breathe. 

And Coulson had told him this bullshit about Nick Fury's frankly insane file system while they'd been huddled together in a hijacked IMF supply car. Anybody who successfully hijacked a SHIELD supply car would find clean clothes, MREs, bottled water, some knives, a comms station, a surprisingly robust field medical kit, and probably a bunch of dog-eared old romance novels, which it is unspoken SHIELD policy to leave behind for the next unfortunate fucks to drop by. IMF supply cars are apparently kitted out with a lot of guns and nothing of practical use, which had been just excellent. Why would a soaking wet and ravenous Clint Barton and Phil Coulson need warm clothes, food, or the ability to radio for help when you could have all the comforts of a fucking survivalist armory bunker? When they'd finally crossed out of Belarus into Poland, Coulson had already started writing an angry letter to SHIELD's IMF liaison using a pilfered Sharpie and Clint's arms. 

Here, now, away from the freezing metal of the subway car, rattling around eastern Europe, Clint suddenly, stupidly remembers how Coulson wrote his lowercase Js — expansive, the soft line of the permanent marker licking across the thin skin and blue veins in the crook of Clint's elbow. His mouth goes dry. 

"Why he knows this isn't really relevant so much as if this is still true," Natasha butts in, because she's wonderful. Because she is also _fucking awful_ , she adds, "We can talk about the incredibly inappropriate asset-handler relationship they cultivated later, if you want."

Stark looks orgasmic. " _Fuck. Yes_."

"Do you think you'd be able to get us access to Fury's files, Agent Barton?" Rogers says, out of clear desperation to get the entire conversation back on track.

"Me? No," Clint says, because he assumes that when SHIELD removed all of his punitive trackers, they implanted additional punitive trackers. "I could tell you where I last knew of them to be — but it could be just part of the stash, not the whole thing."

Banner looks thoughtful. "It'd be a start — but we should really look for a digital footprint, otherwise, too. I read the official report — "

The official report is 600 single-spaced pages long. There is a 10 page entry for Barton, Clinton Francis in the separate index volume.  

" — and if Agent Coulson actually survived the attack then there would have needed to be extensive follow-up and wow," Bruce marvels, stopping himself. "Now that I've actually said it, this all sounds...completely dumb." 

That lands like a brick in the room.

"Hey, Chuckles, JARVIS does not make mistakes," Stark retorts.

"He's not wrong, Stark," Rogers says, in a measured tone that makes Clint want to rip his hair out. Then Rogers makes it worse by looking, just for a beat, over at Clint, at what must be the most exposed and embarrassing and horrible expression Clint's ever worn. Then Steve asks, "Tony, no ego, no aspersions on JARVIS: could this just be a coincidence?"

To Clint, it sounds like, _do we really want to open this wound?_  

Stark sets his jaw, squares it in a way that Clint knows from his years as a dumb kid reads as anger in the body language of powerful, adult white males. It took decades to mute his reflex responses to it — mostly because they kept changing. Little, he shut down, got quiet, waited for the fallout with all his muscles tense. Less little, he hit first. Agent Clint Barton, Specialist, waits for field orders before taking further operational action insofar as its reasonable given current circumstances and available recourse. 

"Agent Agent left a stupendously embarrassing wealth of primary source material for JARVIS to source," Stark says, finally, glowering, talking at a hundred miles an hour. "The algorithm he devised from a randomly selected group of 1,000 posts on the Captain America One Hand on the Keyboard forum identified his posts to a 99.78 percent accuracy, so far as I can tell. This Busmonitor assclown has only made a few dozen posts — not a lot to go on, but the overlap with the algorithm was higher than 50 percent in more than 80 percent of the posts. That's not a coincidence, that's something rotten in your helicopter boat parking lot."

Rogers is glaring. "We get it, Tony — fine." 

"It's not fine!" Stark yells, sounding on the edge of frantic. "It's totally not fine! It is _so_ not fine! I want to know if he's actually dead. Because Fury threw blood soaked vintage cards of your goober face at me and I almost died in an interdimensional _rift._ And after that horrible fucking memorial with all of Agent's cape-wearing, Cheeto-eating friends, I drank white wine spritzers at an _Olive Garden_ with Pepper because she was so _sad_ and just wanted their fucking soup and salad deal for lunch. _I went to an Olive Garden_." 

Clint's used to crazy people. They have a certain frenetic patter that's soothing after the circus and shooting people for money and then shooting people for shittier, government money. Tony is recognizably crazy people. Every inch of him is freaking out: his $500 haircut to his almost high-heeled sneakers. It is a strange, animal comfort to know that Clint's not alone here, standing neck deep in an emotional tar pit and _losing it_. 

Because wiseass is bone deep, not something anybody's ever been able to punch out of him, Clint asks, "Did you go to the one in Times Square?"

Pained, Tony says, "Yes."

Clint looks at Natasha. "That's pretty bad."

Natasha looks back at him with something akin to wonder on her face. Natasha looks at informercials for microwave bacon cooking devices, antique katanas, and news about that weird acid attack at the Russian ballet with wonder on her face. Right now, Clint's not comfortable being in that mix, but her expression isn't angry or impatient. 

Instead of agreeing with the factual statement that drinking white wine spritzers at the Times Square Olive Garden is pretty fucking terrible, Natasha keeps her eyes on Clint and says to the group, "So we should proceed with a fact-finding mission." 

"Yes, for fuck's sake, let's do that," Tony says.

Natasha nods, mostly to herself.  

"Clint can brief us," she says, and points at Rogers. "You're coming with me."

Steve's face is appropriate in pallor at that. 

If Clint wasn't such a fucking trainwreck right now, he'd probably clap Rogers on the shoulder and say, "Wear a cup, buddy," and it is completely, utterly fucking shocking to realize that he _has_ said it out loud — and that as a result, Captain America is making a face at him.

"Thanks, Barton. Really," Rogers says.

"I'm not joking about the cup, man," Clint tells him. Holy fuck. It feels like a boulder in his throat has rolled away. He gets to enjoy that for maybe two seconds before Nat punches him in the fucking arm hard enough to leave a mark, as if she isn't just underlining his original point.

*** 

The back office runs out of a series of leased floors sandwiched between similar operations for almost every major bank headquartered or significantly represented in New York and a fuckload of law firms. SHIELD can't exactly run payroll through ordinary federal channels without enough scrubbing to be a fucking mob operation. As a result, SHIELD administration, payroll and human resources are all housed under a spin-off two shell corporations away from Shield Logistics, a limited liability in which various defense and intelligence agencies own minority stakes in really complicated and boring ways that all boil down to the hilarious fact that Clint's paychecks come from — no fucking joke — Heraldry Roofing Inc. Natasha's roll in from Custom Coats of Arms LP. Agent Foster's entire wetworks team gets W-2s from an Arby's franchise, because at that point payroll was getting bored and increasingly weird.

Which just means that everybody who's part of SHIELD is in on the secret, and that infiltrating offices in White Plains, a bustling hub of affluent Westchester that rolls up its sidewalks at 6 p.m. every night, is every fucking bit as dangerous as trying to break into the helicarrier.  

"Late night security at White Plains is actually higher than at a lot of other bases," Nat is explaining while sharpening a knife. Stark appears to be torn between horror and erotic fixation, staring at the blade; it's hilarious. "The Triskellion and the Hub are its people and its tech, all of which moves around a lot — White Plains could be wiped — "

Steve frowns, and Clint says, "Seriously, don't ask," because he doesn't want to have to tell Captain America that the backup plan of the backup plan of the backup plan involves imploding an agency facility while still fully staffed. 

" — and it would still be an operational hazard because of all the information that gets stored about SHIELD operations, assets and employees," Natasha concludes. "The night detail patrols every 15 minutes, and file rooms and offices are equipped with motion-activated sensors. If the file rooms are anything like midtown, then they can be hermetically sealed, too."

Nick Fury's secret files are somewhere in SHIELD's historical archives — tucked away in deteriorating boxes between 1982 and 1986. They're hard copy, the only copies, and they're covered in Fury's hand, in Coulson's sweeping print, in Maria Hill's editorial drawings. Looking into those boxes is one of the things that gets you a bullet neatly between the eyes, execution style. 

Looking like he already regrets asking, Steve asks, "Hermetically sealed because…?" 

"Sleeping gas, nerve gas," Nat says, offhand. "You know, whatever."

Bruce sighs like he wishes he was back in whatever hellhole Natasha found him, before the Chitauri and Stark's invasive species friendship. "I'll — go see if I can upgrade some gas masks," he says, profound in his sadness, slinking away.

"You know the facility, you know SHIELD, we follow your lead," Rogers tells Natasha, with focus forged in the trials of war or whatever, and Clint can — theoretically — see himself really liking the guy if he weren't 100 percent sure Coulson's jerked it to this dude's old newsreels before.  

Natasha just nods approvingly at Steve. "Meet me here at 2 a.m.," and pausing long enough to look Captain America up and down and find him wanting, adds, "And don't dress like that."

"Wow," Tony interrupts here, making finger guns at Steve and Nat, because he has no sense of self preservation, "while you two crazy kids go on what — frankly — sounds like a pretty spectacular first date, let me tell you, I'm going to see what me and JARVIS can coax out of SHIELD's computers."

Clint asks, "What the hell am I doing during all of this?" before he can stop himself.

***

It turns out what he's doing is sitting around Stark's lab _freaking the fuck out_.

Despite all the mean stuff Sitwell likes to say about him, Clint's a professional. Natasha and him might be weirdly codependent work spouses but he trusts her to stay safe and do what she needs to do. Even if what she needs to do right now is break into a high level SHIELD facility. At least she has Captain America with her, which is a comfort because if there are any explosions or people try to shoot her, Clint assumes Natasha will just hurl Steve at the assailants like a blond bowling ball and make a break for it. 

And that's great, really great. Because Steve seems like a very solid superhuman shield or projectile. But it doesn't address the issue Clint trapped here, sitting on his hands, jogging his knees at different rates out of sheer, crippling nerves.

"Barton," Stark tells him, eyes still fixed on the hovering display in front of him, fingers flying across an antique-looking keyboard, "if you don't stop twitching, I swear to God I will have Dummy — "

Across the lab, one of Stark's robots perks up at this.

" — roll over here and stab you with a tranquilizer, am I being clear?"

Clint ignores the threat to ask, "Did you find anything yet?"

"Weirdly, your super secret spy club has reasonable-cum-near-competent firewalls," Tony answers, distracted. "They've beefed up security since the last time I hacked them."

Even as Clint says, "Is there anything I can help with?" he knows it's fucking pointless, because the sum total of Clint's relationship with technology can be wrapped up in how he has to call people he used to sleep with with spelling questions because he forgets he has like four SHIELD-issue tablets. And an iPad. And that horrible thing Stark gave him.

Tony eyes him. "What — does your keen and assholeish eye for UX also translate into being a whiz at breaking encryption?"

"I meant like, do you need clues for passwords or stuff," Clint snaps, face hot. He watches movies.

"This is less passwords — I am a genius at, well, everything, but especially passwords," Stark declares, all bland self-congratulation, turning back to the floating monitors and their floating numbers, the black window and blue text that's worse than Greek to Clint, because Clint can order beer and ask where to get cheap condoms in Greek ( _not_ his fault) but this shit is total chickenscratch. "This is more faking SHIELD's computers into thinking I'm allowed anywhere near their servers."

Clint asks, "What about computers that aren't SHIELD's computers that are allowed to see SHIELD's computers?"

"That's cute, Greenleaf, but not — " Tony's face, in the middle of the sentence, transformed from patronizing to interested " — do you know of any computers that aren't SHIELD's computers that are allowed to see SHIELD's computers?"

Forty minutes later, Clint's cell phone starts ringing. 

"Clint," Pepper says when he picks up, "why is Tony infiltrating the World Security Council?" 

Tony yells, "It's easier than breaking straight away into SHIELD," and Clint parrots, "Apparently it's easier than breaking straight into SHIELD," because long years of getting his ass chewed out has taught him not to volunteer himself for blame when the consequences are unclear. 

"Where's Steve?" Pepper asks. "Or Natasha?"

Clint says, "Uh," because he is a fucking _abysmal_ liar. On delta, they had one spy (Nat) and one spook (Coulson) and they had one guy who hung around on top of buildings in hide sites because Clint's uselessness playing a character in the field was so legendary Sitwell used to use him as an example in new agent training. 

On the line, Pepper makes a noise of pure frustration that sounds like six swear words smashed together before she hangs up on him. 

"She hung up," Clint says, at Tony and into the air of the lab, wondering. He's been hung up on by a lot of women in his life, but this one feels different and special somehow.

Tony ignores him in favor of yelling at the ceiling, "JARVIS! Get the rest of the Spice Girls down here, I think I found something."  

*** 

Steve Rogers is way, way too nice and America for Clint to harbor any crotch-related thoughts about the guy, but when he appears in Stark's lab dressed in a black leather jacket, black jeans, and some busted-up combat boots, Clint feels momentarily erect and incredibly patriotic. Like, holy shit. Clint has no idea where Natasha got that t-shirt she's painted onto Rogers, but she could sell him on the internet right now and buy a Hawaiian island with the proceeds — be semi-Bond villain neighbors with Larry Ellison.

"You found something?" Rogers asks. 

Tony ignores him to ask Natasha, "Are you shitting me with this?"

She shrugs. "It's my version of decorating a cubicle."

"Stark found something," Clint cuts in, before she decides to tell Stark about how Clint lets her dress him up for funsies, too. Natasha, classy broad she is, never goes any higher brow than second-tier stripper. "Something in the money trail."

Tony waves his hands around, descriptive in their flapping. 

" _Not_ the money trail — if it was the money trail then that would be too easy," he starts, and launches off into a monologue about the _absence_ of irregularities in the money trail, and how the flawlessness of the record keeping itself is suspicious, considering there are entire sections of SHIELD's operational budget that are just solid black redacted pages even on their own internal servers. Tony conveys this information like he's always known it, like he's got a PhD in spec ops and has been working at SHIELD since before someone figured out how to make their old name spell out SHIELD. Forty minutes ago, Clint was writing example shorthand for bribes, illegal weapons, drugs, hookers and weird bribes on napkins from Rizzo's on top of a disintegrating pizza box, because those were some of the few line items that _weren't_ redacted. Just because SHIELD isn't inclined to provide the WSC and the DoD robust and comprehensive records doesn't mean SHIELD doesn't need robust and comprehensive records for itself.

Rogers says, "Not that this isn't interesting, Stark — "

" _Weird_ bribes, Stars and Stripes," Tony says. "They have _op code specifically for weird bribes_."

"Don't make me regret telling you this stuff," Clint says, already regretting telling Tony this stuff.

"But more importantly, does this tell us anything?" Rogers presses on, undeterred. 

Stark's too old to make that face; sulking isn't attractive on a man over 40. 

"It's a good sign," he says finally, grudging. "Because in the midst of absolute chaos, you wouldn't be this meticulous with your record keeping on boring garbage like computer seats and legal pads unless you were trying to hide something much bigger. Because if you were going to fake a death or keep someone in stasis or engage in any other major medical intervention of the caliber needed — say — after being stabbed through the chest with an evil Asgardian staff, perchance, you'd need stuff. Lots of stuff."

"Doctors," Clint jumps in. He thinks he hears his voice crack, a little. "Surgeons."

"Specialists," Stark sweeps in. "Other people and things and stuff. And hush money — due to which we went to a _funeral_ and I went to an _Olive Garden_."

Banner, shuffling into the room clutching an armful of forbidding objects, announces himself by saying, "You know, the Olive Garden's not that bad," and then turns to Rogers and Natasha, adding, "I made you guys some gas masks, but I'm going to need someone who isn't shitty at welding to go over them again if we want to avoid the eventual equipment failure and death."

" _Oh_ ," Stark coos, "gimme — I wanna try a thing. A new welder thingy I built." 

Clint turns to Natasha. He doesn't say, _I have regular gas masks in Brooklyn_ , but she gets it because she gets him, grins, and rubs their shoulders together.

"So we're just operating on the assumption that something will go wrong, and your bosses will try to gas us to death," Rogers asks them, but not really asking. He also doesn't sound that worried about it, which Clint guesses makes sense.  

Anybody who had endured ( _had the fucking privilege of_ ) long-term exposure to Coulson knows a lot about Rogers' war history, which is only red, white, and bleeding eagle blue in grade school textbooks. Once you get to the primary sources, shit gets interesting; there's a lot of newsreels and documentation, and in Steve Rogers may have beat the heart of an archetypal soldier, but that shit was hooked up to the brain of a total crazy person doing crazy things fighting crazy people. Compared to nazis who had transformed their faces into literal red skulls, what was a little poison gas, Clint guesses.

In the background, Stark's trying to get what looks like one of those robot dogs to do mechanical work on the gas masks. This is slightly less crazy than it sounds on the outset because Stark's apparently given the robot dog laser eyes. 

"That's usually how it goes, yeah," Nat says, leaning over a lab table and staring blatantly at the broad planes of Steve's chest. 

Steve, who is clearly used to people objectifying him but completely unclear on how to react to it or how he feels about it, squirms. 

In the background, Stark's now yelling at one of his robots for overenthusiastic assistance and Banner is wrapping another layer of duct tape around something. 

Clint grinds the heel of a hand into his eye socket. He keeps hearing Tony's whip-quick "if the spear shredded his heart there'd be no chance" and Banner's "reconstructive surgery has made leaps and bounds — and that's not even considering whatever SHIELD is keeping hidden up its sleeve," and grits his teeth.

Then Natasha's pressing a palm to the back of his neck, murmuring, "Hey."

Clint's no good at lying to Nat. More than that, there's no point, so he just shakes his head and tries to make himself smaller, crush the same matter into a more finite space.

"This is dangerous," he mumbles at her.  

"I'm pretty good at dangerous," she promises.

"This is probably for bullshit — for nothing," Clint says, but the truth of it isn't enough to tamp down how desperately hopeful he feels, the way it's filling up his chest and making his knees and throat hurt. He wants so fucking badly, he wants comprehensively, he wants in that greedy way that makes people who are habitually poor buy flat screen televisions on payday because they know the money's going to be gone soon — that this is their singular opportunity — and he wants not to think about having to take it to the fucking pawn shop two weeks later. 

"Maybe," she concedes. "But maybe it's not."

"If this isn't — I can't again, Nat," Clint chokes out, all the other stuff floating around them in the tension of his neck and the white grip of his hands. 

If this turns out to be a snipe hunt, wasted time. If at the end of Stark's digging and Natasha's infiltration all they get are further confirmations that Coulson — Phil — PC's dead, that he's buried in Arlington with new grass lush green over him. Then what? Then Clint can be disproportionately fucked up all over again. He can stare at his ceilings and make Kate crazy with worry and Nat pace around him while he tries and fails fucking miserably to be sad the way he's supposed to be sad, the way you are about a good friend and a coworker. But the way his organs are tied up in knots aren't aligned with the paperwork, with the actual history of of things. 

Clint has been to a lot of SHIELD funerals over the years, played honor guard to the casket and stood in black suits over the shoulders of husbands and wives, partners and parents. He feels like those people do, when they're locking their knees so they can stand up, when they look like they want to fall into that hole in the ground along with whoever's gone ahead without them. 

The thing those SHIELD hand-me-down romance novels neglected to mention is that the tearing, horrible crush of love isn't the result of two explosive agents coming into contact— it does not need two people to cause an fire. Clint is both the tinder and the spark; he's got the third degree burns to prove it. He can feel it licking up his chest, down the muscles of his back, smoke filling up the room and making his eyes water. 

The fucking unfairness of it is making it hard to talk. If Clint was going to grieve like this, he should have gotten some promises while Coulson was alive. He should have gotten Coulson's flag at the services. He should have Coulson's house keys. He should have his affects. They should have had at least five years of a bed that smells like both of them. In the calculus of grief, all of the variables that mean Clint is here dying the way he's dying should translate into something different on the other side of the equal sign.  

Natasha knows this, as much as she can know something Clint can't bear to say out loud, anyway, so she presses a fierce, close-mouthed kiss to his temple. She whispers, "We have to try," and then she's gone, off to collect one of Banner's gas masks and Captain America, calling, "We'll be radio silent once we're inside the facility," as they leave. 

***

Natasha and Steve come back blank-faced six hours later, barely looking out of breath. They hand Stark a thumb key, and when Tony throws the images up across the windows, the files and notes, the documentation blurs the cityscape of New York behind it — the Chrysler building lights gleaming faintly through the schematics of a stealth plane.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning in this chapter for some pretty graphic body horror.

Three days later, Stark sends everybody a text:

_Avengers do that alliterative thing in the 50th floor kitchen_  

Clint feels like he floats there: doesn't remember the trip in from Brooklyn or the elevator up from street level.

When the doors slide open sky high in the tower, it's to a wild-eyed Tony Stark wearing a lead bib, orange crocs, his hair pinned back by a polka-dot headband, and saying, "Barton — what the fuck is that?"

Lucky, taking offense, backs up further into the elevator and barks at Tony the way he barks at lapdogs: with deep suspicion.

"We were on a walk," Clint says, because he'd been suffering the silent catatonia of long-term tension, still frantically — and tiredly — turning over the possibilities in his head, watching Lucky take the world's most elaborate shit. Then the text had come, none of his neighbors were in, and who the fuck knew how long this was going to take. So, because Clint is both a shitty and good pet owner, he'd stuffed himself and Lucky into a car and drove wildly, wildly dangerously into the city. 

Tony narrows his eyes. "Why does he have an eyepatch?"

Lucky has an eyepatch because Kate Bishop is _ridiculous_ and spending way too much time on some website about crafting. It's purple because at least she respects Clint's wishes in some small, meaningless ways.

"What did you guys find out?" Clint asks, because he genuinely doesn't know why Lucky has an eyepatch, only that he'd passed out on the couch yesterday watching a This Old House marathon on PBS and woken up this morning to pizza dog, version pirate. And then the fat bastard had been ultra attached to the thing and whined and shook his head out of Clint's hands over and over again every time Clint tried to give the dog back its dignity. So fuck it. They'd gone out like that. He'd been complimented by four people in skinny jeans and two guys with elaborate facial hair by the end of his block — fucking gentrification.

Tony gives Lucky one last, lingering look of suspicion before saying, "Stuff — things — it's complicated."

Clint has a vivid, intense flashback to the time he'd been loitering around Fury's office door, waiting to get his ass chewed out, and overhearing Coulson calling from Malibu to say he was going to shoot Stark in both his knees. 

Thank God Steve sticks his head around a corner right then and says, "Hey — pirate dog!" which is just so annoyingly endearing that it prevents Clint from acting on the reflex of doing stuff Coulson wants and beating Tony senseless.

It takes another 10 minutes before Natasha rolls in, clutching a carton of assorted Baked by Melissa cupcakes. Her expression makes it clear she's in no mood to share, but Clint is an asshole so he just watches Steve and Bruce play with Lucky — who is in raptures, equal odds on if that's because he's a dumbass or just everybody loves Steve — while Tony figures that shit out by himself. 

"Enough shenanigans," Tony says finally, clutching at his rapidly bruising hand and glaring at Nat. "I brought you all here to tell you important, potentially life-changing—"

Bruce, who is rapidly becoming Clint's favorite Avenger, just sighs and does something to a tablet, and the whole wall behind Tony's head turns into a monitor again, screens and screens of diagrams and files and — 

"My God," Steve whispers, and Lucky presses close, whining. 

This time, when Tony talks, he's quieter, grim. "Some of those pages you guys brought back that we thought were gibberish? They were just coded, and they resolved into images of — well — that you see here."

Clint is intimately familiar with gore, the rubbed-penny smell of blood and the hot musk of someone's insides on the outside. He knows the body and all the ways you can rip and rend it, but in his merc days those were marks, and in his SHIELD days those were bad guys — or at least he was just a weapon aimed by someone making the least of all possible mistakes. Clint's broken a lot of bones and woken up in a lot of hospitals, and he's not scared of them the way other people are: medical is where you go once your backup comes in, once you've hit a safe house, once Coulson's found you where you were bleeding out in the dense jungle, rationing your energy for breathing. He's burst in on back room mob surgeries and field treated compound fractures, held filthy palms over thigh wounds, felt femoral arteries bleeding out.

But this is different — this is a man's chest cracked open. 

There're rib spreaders in place, but it's more for show than anything because the ribs are a fucking mess, bone shattered, and beneath the surgical lights is a brutal mess of shredded organs. There's the pulpy sponge of lung and the torn muscle of heart, blood welling up, metal instruments clamping off who the fuck knows what, Clint can't tell where one broken thing ends and another begins, and he can't stop staring at the fringes of the picture. There are green and blue surgical scrubs and gloved hands, but they hover around the frame of a dress shirt, cut through, soaked in ruby port blood, a tie tossed out of the way, the edges of a single breasted suit, the black sickly and drenched through. 

Nat talks first. She says, "That's not survivable." 

"That's just the first picture," Tony says, grim.

The next five pictures are just the same fucking shitshow, and Clint is about to ask what the fucking _point_ of calling them here just to make him look at Coulson ripped to pieces is, wouldn't it have been better just to call and say, "he's definitely dead, you can keep mourning like an unacknowledged widow now," when Bruce says:

"This is where it gets — weird."

Clint stares at him. Thankfully, Steve says it for them all when he asks, " _Weird?_ "

Banner gets that reflexive wince, that tick in his eye, and he scrubs the heel of his hand into the arch of his browline, and waves at the wall, where one excruciatingly scarlet photo turns into something different altogether as he mutters, "Weird." 

"The date stamp on this implies some time has passed," Stark says, calling up a window with streams of metadata: image encoding information, dates, times. Clint doesn't care about any of that, because this is still Coulson, only his eyes are closed peacefully in a parody of sleep, or it looks like sleep, most of his body covered up with a blue surgical cloth. There's — there's fucking frost on his eyebrows.

"I—Is he asleep?" Clint asks, and it comes out first with a click in his throat.  

"Um, _no_ ," Stark says. "From the file info it looks like this image was taken eight days after the first set of pictures."

Bruce, quietly, says, "There's no heart lung perfusion system attached — there's every indication he's dead in this photograph." 

"You said this got weird," Natasha cuts in, brisk the way she's always brisk when people die on her watch, when she's turning off nonessential systems so she can bear through something, the way she bears through everything. "Dead is not weird."

"The next chunk is missing, timeline-wise," Stark answers, and makes a sweeping motion with his hand to bring up another file, this one straight gibberish. "We can't seem to crack this one — it's not code, and it's not any language we know. In the order of the files you brought back, we can assume it's chronologically between the earlier stuff and, well, this."

The next file is a video.

It's Coulson again, the same sleep-smoothed face and the blue surgical drop cloth, but there's a steady, beeping noise in the room now, the murmur of voices in the background. There's the occasional hand whipping in front of the camera, and then he hears — fucking _Jesus_ — then he hears Dr. Steiten say, "Any neurological response?" and someone else, someone Clint doesn't recognize, say, "No — nothing."

"He's _dead_ , what are they _doing?_ " Steve asks, finally, 2 more minutes into the video, which is so fucking unsettling, just a steady shot of Coulson's face and someone saying, "Mark — mark — mark," at seemingly randomized time intervals.

"I took the liberty of pulling a background sound profile from the footage and compared it with audio from all known medical machinery," JARVIS chimes in from overhead, doing nothing really to alleviate the tension. 

In front of Clint's face, someone's gloved hand presses on the skin of Coulson's pale cheek, moves to push up the lid, and Clint has to smash his eyes shut before he sees the dead blue there, fogged over.

"From my analysis, there's a 98 percent chance we have at least two separate machines running: a heart lung perfusion system as well as an intracranial pressure monitor," JARVIS continues, bloodless. "Unfortunately, the angle of the video makes it impossible to verify the types of surgical procedures being done."

Bruce says, "We're pretty sure this is a surgical monitoring video, nothing for a permanent file, but maybe something surgical assistants were watching in another room."

"What were they watching for is what I want to know," Natasha murmurs, standing to get a closer look at the video, narrowing her eyes. "He's pinker in this." 

"Pinker," Steve repeats, skeptical.

Clint pushes up out of his seat, and goes to stand over Natasha's shoulder as she says, "Coulson put both of us on Captain America Thaw Watch; I know when someone's defrosting," and Tony says, "Oh my _God_ , were there no limits to how man-crushy his man-crush on you was?" and Clint just reaches out like he can touch the image that's hovering in front of his face, run his fingers over the cold planes of Coulson's face.

"What are they doing to him?" Clint asks, and he doesn't realize he's asking it until he's listening to the silence that comes after. He swallows hard, and he asks, "I mean — if he's dead, if they had him on ice — what are they doing to him?" 

Banner clears his throat. "Our best guess is they're reviving him." Pause. "Somehow."

Clint turns to stare at Tony, to stare at Bruce, who both have the flat, tired expressions of people who have already looked at this problem for a long time. And Steve, where he's tense on the edge of the sofa, looks lost, staring as the video keeps running, near soundless behind Clint. 

"After at least — what, eight days of being dead?" Clint asks. His voice doesn't sound like his own. It sounds far away from him. "How is that possible?"  

He doesn't ask, _what are they even bringing back?_

"It's Fury," Tony says, like that explains everything. 

Then Steve snaps, "Pause the video," and when Clint turns back, it's to see the tell-tale metal and amber architecture of a piece of Chitauri technology at the corner of the image, just a snatch of the segmented body of a piece of armor, the very definition of alien against the bland hospital blue.

***

Officially, Nick Fury is Phil Coulson's boss: in the psuedo-military parlance of SHIELD, Coulson and Hill are his XOs. 

Unofficially, in the bone and blood and mud of brotherhood, Fury and Coulson are the type of dicks that became best friends at Ranger school, so off the clock, they are the _fucking worst._ Clint says this having grown up with circus people. Natasha says this having grown up in the _Red Room_. If you get Sitwell drunk enough he'll tell you a horrifying old school story about the infancy of Fury's and Coulson's SHIELD tenure that involves literally 40 rubber dongs and a dare about a car battery and testicles. 

"I guess if you have rolled around in puke and piss-filled mud together for days, you don't mind sharing experiences that involve rubber dongs, a car battery, and each other's testicles," Sitwell had said, sounding sad about his professional choices. 

Coulson has keys to Fury's apartment, which is fucking weird, because until Clint had stolen Coulson's key ring for funsies that one endless op in Mozambique, Clint had just assumed Fury attached himself to one of the pull-up bars in the gym and slept in bat form. One time, when Coulson had succumbed to one of those immortal flus that live inside the ventilation systems of all New York office buildings, swear to God, Clint saw Fury bring Coulson a quart of soup from the Second Avenue Deli. 

In the years Clint's shared radio lines and ops tents and mess halls with those two bastards, he's heard Fury say, "Sweetheart, you kiss your mother with that mouth?" and Coulson say, "No, asshole, I save that shit for yours." 

People like them — like Clint, like Natasha — they don't make friends a lot, not the kind you give your house keys to and make your mom jokes with and who have probably electrocuted your nuts in some sort of fucking crazy person military bonding ritual. 

So yeah, Tony's right. It's Fury. And it's Coulson. 

***

Nat and Steve were in the file rooms at White Plains for a sum total of 34 minutes, and got out by the skin their teeth between two patrols. The files they brought back aren't comprehensive, but the rest of the stuff they manage to sift through is stomach churning and implies more of the same: Coulson was dead, and then maybe he wasn't, that they'd cut him open again and thawed him out, stuffed him full of Chitauri technology. They know that his there's a blacker than black ops team involved now, existence paper-only, and through the process of elimination and insider information, they've narrowed the potential members to just a handful of people who are OTOO.

"Off-tracking/on-ops," Natasha tells Stark, because at this point the guy's balls deep into SHIELD's computerized guts and knows the organizational shorthand for "weird bribe," and it's pointless to be coy about it. "It's for when you're in the field but — for security reasons — not on the grid."

Tony stares at the ops list. "That's like — a hundred people right now."

"Excluding wetworks," Clint says. Wetworks is never on any grids. Wetworks is an extraordinarily successful Arby's in New Mexico.  

"Which — " Tony points at him " — believe me, we will talk about wetworks later, but _excluding a more-specialized assassination squad_ , that is like 100 people."

Nat hums and slants a look at Clint. She asks, "Six?"

"Higher," Clint disagrees. "Minimum seven."

"Thirty-four," Tony interrupts, mulish. "Purple. Banana hammock."

"JARVIS," Natasha says, ignoring him. "Can you remove all agents on the list who are clearance level six and below?"

The list of names and IDs drops from more than a hundred to less than ten. Clint and Nat say, " _Not_ Blake," immediately, because the two months Blake and Coulson had shared an office wall had been terrible for literally everybody at SHIELD. If they were trapped on an op together people would know from the flaming wreckage and body count by now. 

"Not Sitwell," Nat says. "We saw him at HQ this week."

" _Maybe_ Sitwell," Clint disagrees, because Sitwell is the best liar in all of SHIELD. Sitwell's mom legitimately thinks he's an orthodontist. 

"Field team, stealth jet, unlikely he's base-bound," Steve cuts in, and standing up to get a better look at the names and designations, he says, "Is it likely that science and technology folks this high up on the clearance list are mobile?"

Natasha nods approvingly. "Good catch. Usually they run various tech sites — JARVIS?"

Two more names disappear, Darby and Slanger, who co-manage the Sandbox, and that leaves just a few potentials: Yang, Soleymani, Ward —

"Mei," Natasha says. "They were at the academy together."

Melinda Mei and Coulson worked together during the Jurassic period, before Fury was director. One time she snapped in Coulson's ear and he fucking _flinched away from her_ , and for that and other equally compelling reasons, Clint never knows whether to shit himself or pop a boner around her. 

"She's not on any other duty rosters," Stark chimes in, typing rapidly. "Before she went on your dumb oo-two list she was doing some kind of paperpushing."

Clint glances at Natasha. "It could be her, I guess."

"If I was making a even more classified SHIELD team, I'd want the Cavalry," Nat says, mild, at which point Steve adds:

"And it looks from her file she knows how to fly that stealth jet we found records for."

"Every time you say 'stealth jet,'" Tony cuts in, "I just hear 'challenge accepted.'"

"Okay, okay," Bruce interrupts, holding his hands out like the daycare workers at SHIELD sometimes do, when they're trying to settle clusters of spy toddlers in the midtown lobby, each of them lojacked to the gills. "Before we start hunting down — " he pauses, making a pained face " — terrifying stealth jets that SHIELD will surely have us killed for knowing about, what is the end game here?"

Nat glares at him. "The end game is to figure out what happened, Banner."

"Yeah, but — wouldn't they have told you? If you were supposed to know?" Banner asks. "I mean, listen, I've registered my deep and profound distrust of SHIELD and Fury in the past, and that hasn't changed. But say Coulson's alive. Say they did some fucked up shit to him, stuck some Chitauri tech in his guts — "

Clint digs the nails of his fingers into the meat of his palm, fists his hand so hard his knuckles hurt, because the thought of filling up the good, _human_ spaces inside of Coulson with something...not makes him sick. He'd never agree to it. He has an ironclad DNR filed with his attorney and at home in his desk. And if this is true — is he — is it still Coulson?  

" — why hasn't he looked you guys up?" Bruce goes on. "You're his guys, right?"

"Maybe he's compromised," Natasha snaps, and Clint's glad that when she gets pissed she gets verbal, because when he's this hurt his throat just closes up. "Maybe he's hurt and doesn't know how to get in touch with us." 

"Or maybe he doesn't want to be found," Bruce proposes. 

Clint's not sure if he forgets or just that he hasn't had a lot of time to think about it, but this weird little survivalist group of shifting allegiances that's gathered in the living room of Stark's giant penis tower? Clint forgets they don't get it. Not yet.

Stark is crazy and lonely and bought all of his friends retail, and in a fucking terrible and sad way, maybe he'll never really believe that the people who like him actually like him, because when it all began it was randomized pay raises for Pepper and experimental jets for Rhodey, bottle service for that chauffeur of his. He hasn't even learned after the bullshit and torture and self-sacrifice, because he more or less stole Bruce Banner off of a New York street and stuck him in some sort of nerd cloister in the tower — directly adjacent to the multiple floors of super hero harem he built with archery ranges and epically useless shoe closets. And Rogers might be all about brotherhood and go army, but he's got the most impressive case of repressed PTSD Clint's ever read about that he's not supposed to have read about. Literally what the fuck is there to say about Bruce Banner, who did supersoldier experiments on himself, fucked up real bad, and would 100 percent prefer to be in some shitstained refugee camp than New York, which he mostly associates with that time he decimated a giant chunk of Harlem.  

Maybe Bruce is right. Maybe Coulson doesn't want anything to fucking do with them. Maybe he's hidden away on purpose, used a scalpel on top of a blunt instrument to remove himself and every — almost every, Clint thinks — trace. Maybe he wants never to see Clint and Natasha again, wanted to put miles of daylight and time zones between the people he knew and the life he'd carved out — but what the rest of the assholes in this room don't get is that _Coulson doesn't get to make that call_.

Right now, SHIELD doesn't like Clint a lot, but in the years and years and millions of miles that Clint has traveled, they have been the net waiting for him under the tightrope.  They've been his shitty siblings and tyrannical parents, every fucking first cousin and uncle and aunt — a sprawling awful shitshow of a family. They were in his business and trafficked in embarrassing Clint Barton stories. SHIELD is not necessarily the good guys, but they aren't the bad guys — in comparison. They are circumscribed inside a fortress of complicated alliances and Machiavellian choices. They are comfortingly, reliably terrible mac and cheese and bad coffee and agency-issued cots that smell the same everywhere you go. They are the champions of interagency kickball six years running, because when you play versus the CIA and NSA, cheating and espionage beginning up to two months prior to the game is practically required. SHIELD is where Clint grew up, and Coulson is who made sure he lived to see it. 

To Stark and Banner and maybe even Rogers, the system is obscure directives without explanation to be considered with suspicion and ignored at will. To Clint, to Nat, the system is trusting Sitwell to brief them, Coulson to watch over them in the field, Hill to establish the infrastructure, and Fury not to spend them cheaply, even if they've agreed to let him chamber them. 

If Coulson is alive, if he's shuddering in and out breaths, or if he's lying on a hospital bed with machines forcing that into his lungs, then Clint and Nat are coming for him. It doesn't matter if he doesn't want them there, if he wants to run — he's forever responsible for the people he's tamed. If Coulson wants to go far away, then Natasha and Clint will go far away with him.  

"We'll decide if we care what Coulson wants once we figure out if he's alive," Natasha says matter-of-fact. "For now — what we need for you to do is get us to that jet."

Stark looks rapturous. 

Rogers says, "I'm calling Miss Potts."

*** 

Pepper, for all that she's the voice of (relative) reason, is voluntarily fucking Tony Stark on the regular, so Steve and Bruce really shouldn't have relied too heavily on her to be a tempering influence on this entire debacle-in-progress. She has one of her secretaries send Captain America to voicemail — which, _weird_ — and then when she calls back an hour later, she sounds only pretend mad, the way Sitwell gets pretend mad when he finds Clint teaching the baby agents how to create extemporaneous weapons out of shit they find in the supply cabinets and SHIELD mess. 

"Well clearly Stark Industries can't appear to have anything to do with this," she says, and Bruce looks so momentarily hopeful that it's almost sad when she adds, "Which is fine since I doubt SHIELD will want to disclose to anybody that we were able to so easily locate their stealth jet." 

"Yeah, Pep, it's not like we really need your permission here," Stark cuts in, trying to appear as if he's not waiting for her permission.

"Of course, Tony," she allows, rolling her eyes, and says, "Go for it."

"You don't own me," Stark quips, fairly vibrating with excitement, "I do what I want."

This time, Pepper turns to Natasha. "I'll file a flight plan with the FAA for Singapore and buy the appropriate carbon offsets — it won't buy you a lot of time once you guys get within their range."

"We'll make it work," Natasha says. "Appreciate it, Miss Potts."

Pepper looks directly at Clint, smiling. "Anytime — and good luck, Clint."

"Uh, okay," Clint chokes out, feeling flustered and all of 14. Fuck. This is worse than 14. Clint was a smooth operator at 14.

Finding the stealth jet takes hours and hours, during which Stark is furious and spends a lot of time banging around the guts of his computer, yelling at JARVIS for disappointing him and getting snotty comments back from his house computer about stage parenting. Clint spends most of this time training until his arms are shaking and taking Lucky out for one million walks; he's a big hit with the Midtown corporate lunch crowd. By the time they get back to the Tower, he finds Steve, Natasha and Bruce watching Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids with a combined, terrifying intensity.

"Are you being serious with me right now?" Clint asks them.  

Lucky, the traitor, just wuffs and gallops over to flop in Natasha's lap, rolling onto his back so she can rub her hands all over his belly. Somehow maintaining her dignity  through all of this, Natasha says, "Stark has it narrowed down a little."

Steve makes a snorting noise. Clint likes Captain America a lot better now that he knows Steve Rogers is a comforting, regular human jerk sometimes.

"Specifically, he said it's 'somewhere in Asia,'" Bruce clarifies. 

"But that was two hours ago," Steve adds, "and given that it's a plane…"

Which is how Clint ends up watching Say Yes to the Dress: Bridesmaids, too, sitting through two objectively terrible episodes before Stark hollers:

" _Fucking eat it, assholes, I fucking_ have _you_. That's right, Daddy's coming you — yeah, you just park there, you hot piece of stealth plane ass — "

They interrupt before it gets any more disturbing.

***

In the circus, you learned a little of everything.  

Nobody could shoot the way Clint did, but Billy and Cyrus both could do a little, and if they stripped down the act and moved the targets a few feet closer, you could muddle through on days Clint was down with the flu. Same went for Sarah and Jessie, subbing in for tumblers with sprained ankles, and Missy Mae was almost as good as Jed when it came to juggling, even if the big clown shoes didn't fit her right. 

Clint had hung around with the trapeze guys. He liked the heights. Right on page one of his SHIELD psych abstract is a note in Dr. Soroyan's boxy handwriting making a note of Clint's "problematic thrill seeking tendencies, having reached a level of competence in the face of controlled danger that drives Specialist Barton to seek out deadly and extremely high-risk circumstances." This shit started young, started when Clint used to hang from the trapeze bars by his creaky teenaged knees and stare down, miles down, pendulous and heavy in the head and shoulders, feeling gravity drag at him and lose when Clint would launch off — sail weightless through the air.

So when Stark's back-up, unregistered plane (what the _fuck_ ) catches up to the stealth jet and find it midway through a launch sequence, Clint doesn't think. He doesn't think about how long it will take to find the jet again, if they lose it, how SHIELD is good at learning from its mistakes, and that this might be their only chance. He doesn't think about the ulcerating mass of guilt and hurt that's been throbbing in his gut now for months. He doesn't think. 

He just moves — the way he used to just let go of the trapeze bars. 

What's the point of Stark's jet descending to land the same time the stealth jet is steaming up the same stretch of runway in some awful game of plane chicken if not to let Clint open the cargo release and _jump_.

He lands on the fucking nose of the stealth jet with a bone-crunching clatter, feet skidding for purchase and all the wind knocked out of him, just a pair of vibranium knives anchoring him to the sheet metal skin. The wind is whipping at his face and the noise is like an oncoming train, and Clint can't even tell if the pilot is slowing down — fuck SHIELD and its active recruitment of borderline sociopaths, anyway.

But the plane does slow, eventually, the wind giving way to the other noises of the airstrip, the sound of people yelling (at Clint) in the distance. And when Clint can lift his head and unclench his white-knuckled grip a little from the knives, it's to look up  and see _Melinda fucking Mei_ — glowering at him through the windshield of the jet.


	6. Chapter 6

Immediately after the engines cut, a lot of noises filter in: the high whine of the Iron Man armor powering up, Steve yelling, guns, someone telling Clint to "release the bus" before they're forced the shoot. Mei is glaring at him still, and under almost any other conditions Clint would respond or move or say something, except behind her, through the glass, he sees the cockpit door open and Coulson walk in looking confused, his mouth moving, before he looks up — 

Before he looks up, and right at Clint.

Clint read that the perception of time changes depending on the body's metabolic rate, because SHIELD medical is profoundly terrible, and sometimes your only entertainment option is stealing the fringe science journals your RN — worryingly — reads. So they said that maybe as you get older, time seems to move faster around you, blurring away from the infinite summer afternoons of being nine years old, when the prairie winds rose up and Clint stuck his head out the back of the circus trucks like the mutt he's always been. They said that the world, to smaller animals, seems to move much slower, and since Clint has always felt fucking tiny next to the hugeness of everything he'd let Coulson become to him, it makes sense that Clint stares into the guy's slate blue eyes for maybe a year, maybe a decade, and that to everybody else it would last all of two seconds before some secret agent Ken Doll in BDUs  _shoots Clint with a ray gun_.

*** 

Clint wakes up wracked with full body regret trapped inside of a room made of inside-out Duplo blocks. He must be on Coulson's jet, because Stark's plane had been swank and shady as hell, but nowhere during the extensive tour had Stark mentioned an interrogation room slash torture chamber. They haven't handcuffed him to anything but someone — fucking Mei, Clint bets anything it's fucking Mei — had left him splayed like one of Jack's French girls on the freezing metal table.  

"Fuck," Clint says at the Duplo ceiling.

Five minutes later, when he's using the jagged metal edge of the chair — what remains of the chair — to carve at what might be a structural weakness in the room, the intercom crackles to life.

"Hello, Agent Barton," an English girl says.

"You're not in any danger," comes a Scottish voice, male. "The Night Night Gun was designed to disable, not cause permanent harm — if you're feeling any palpitations, in upward of 60 percent of cases they go away within 72 hours."

Clint ignores both of them. He keeps scraping away at the wall. Mostly it's guessing because he knows fuck all about this jet. In the briefings, it looked boring to fly and too big for most of the stealth work he and Natasha count as their bread and butter. 

"Clearly," the girl cuts in, "we understand this is a stressful and confusing time, and we appreciate your patience. If you could just answer the following questions on the scale of one — not at all — to five — extremely — it would be helpful in having us determine how to proceed." 

Underneath the Duplo block covering is some sort of metal he can't seem to make a mark on, not even with the steel bones of the chair. He bets this is alien shit, and Clint feels one of those hot flares of anger at the thought that 15 years of toeing the line and taking gut shots for SHIELD left him fucking here: locked into an interrogation room in a plane that's been deemed need to know. 

He keeps seeing Coulson's fucking face through the pilot's window of the jet, and fuck his eyes, because that means he sees the reflection of his own face, too: crushed, bloodless, completely exposed. Clint thinks he probably still looks like that, like someone had taken a scalpel and peeled back the skin of his chest and cut away the muscle and sawed through the bone, until his bruised and busted heart was there in the open for Coulson to reach in and rip it out of its place. 

The English girl says, "Do you experience repeated and/or disturbing memories, thoughts, or images from a stressful experience in the past — one to five?"

There's a static noise and then a protest of, "Sir!" muffled through fabric, before the buzzing sound of the door lock sounds and fucking Coulson steps into the room.

On the intercom, Mei's voice rings out: 

"Don't try anything Barton."

If she says anything else, Clint doesn't catch it.

Coulson is closing the door of the Duplo room behind himself, neat and contained as he's ever been. Clint just stares, hungry for the details: the unfamiliar tie, the tailored lines of Coulson's suit, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Everything about him is different and exactly the same. Coulson looks as composed as ever, but older now, too, a meticulously crafted weapon still dangerous after long use, and Clint wonders if that's how this happened — if maybe Fury didn't have the heart to let go of this gun. 

Clint wants to say a whole bunch of stuff. It all gets jammed up against each other in his throat, like Coulson's shouted "fire!" in the proverbial movie theater. 

"Barton," Coulson says out loud, finally. It's worse than shouting "fire!" 

Clint doesn't say anything. The entire first month he was at SHIELD he hadn't said anything, beginning as a desperate bid to avoid self-incrimination and evolving rapidly into cussedness.  

Coulson has the fucking audacity to cock an eyebrow and say, "This is the quietest I've ever seen you." 

By the time he'd met Coulson for the first time, Clint was mostly known for never shutting up. 

"You _fucking asshole_ ," tumbles out of Clint's mouth, finally, the hard consonants an angry scrape of teeth against his bottom lip. 

Instead of getting pissed or being an inscrutable dick and making Clint scrub out a fucking toilet with a toothbrush, Coulson just smiles tiredly, like he's _missed this_. He says, quiet, "There you are."

It's hard, it hurts, it feels like he has to push through a wall of skin and bone to get it out, but Clint says, "I was here the whole time. Where the fuck were you?" He stares at Coulson's face and wonders if he's an LMD, if he's a clone. "Fury told us you died."

"I did," is Coulson's answer, light and noncommittal, and he rests a hip against the table. 

"Are you a clone?" Clint asks, because fuck, he lives a terrible God damn life where that's a real question he really has to ask. 

Coulson's smile gets crooked. "No — and I'm not an LMD either."

Clint believes him. Or anyway, Clint thinks he believes. He's met a baker's dozen of clones in his time at SHIELD, and there's always something missing in the eyes, the tilt of the head. The small details and presentation are always perfect, but from a distance, there's always something off. It makes R&D fucking bugfuck; it makes them start reading paranormal fringe journals looking for the stuff of the soul. The LMDs are even worse, personality programmable but static. They're the perfect snapshot of a singular moment in time, but they never change; the androids Clint has met are more convincingly human — curious, fickle, possessive, petty. 

"How, then?" Clint asks, and watches Coulson's face go serene with detachment. It's the expression of a man who's trained himself out of his reflexive flinch so well that his tell is being excessively placid. "I — " Clint stumbles, realizes he doesn't actually know if it's okay that he's seen what he's seen, but then he decides fuck it, because Coulson's evidently been faking his death like they're all living in a post-shower episode of Dallas " — we saw pictures of some kind of procedure."

"How much of it did you see?" Coulson asks, like he's just idly interested. 

Too much. "Not a lot," Clint says. "Natasha and Cap had to break into White Plains."

"I leave an icon of integrity and truth with you two for less than a year and you have him breaking and entering," Coulson murmurs, but his grin is back. This isn't the way Clint saw this conversation going down.

"Seriously, what the fuck is going on," Clint bites out. 

He's starting to dig his nails into the meat of his palms to keep from reaching out and grabbing Coulson, to keep from shoving him into walls and putting hands on him, to testify that he's real and really there, with the solid mass of a person, breathing in and out with the soft tissue of his lungs.  

Coulson hears something in Clint's voice he hadn't before, or that he's finally listening for now, because his face goes from its posed casual affection to something more tender and breakable. Clint knows that expression from waking up in Medical and being pulled out of jaws of death by his handler, from when he'd found himself ready to get on his knees and beg that SHIELD give Natasha the chance they'd given him. In the years Clint has known Coulson, he's done terrible things and never flinched, because the side of the just sometimes needed someone to be their thin black line, the advance team, the plausible deniability. Coulson always comes back from it. He still remembers peoples' birthdays and spends most of his disposable income on handmade suits like an asshole and tells everybody about how the one time Clint and Natasha went to the fucking operaon an op Clint burst into tears during the second act and Natasha fell asleep. Coulson is better than perfect — he's real. He touches darkness, but it doesn't keep him.

"Don't lie to me, okay?" Clint says, or he means to say it, but it comes out pleading. "I just — don't fucking lie to me anymore."

"I won't. I'm not. I promise," Coulson tells him, the way you say something reassuring, the way he talks to victims and people who turn on their bosses in SHIELD safe houses and interrogation rooms, when they need a soft touch. "We were waiting until you woke up."

"We," Clint repeats, and thinks about Mei and Secret Agent Ken Doll, the English girl over the speaker and the Scottish voice that had joined her. He thinks that Coulson's got all new people now, probably, that he's run away and traded up. 

"I thought I should tell you and Natasha together," Coulson says. "After she was finished threatening to shoot off my testicles, she agreed."

Natasha threatening to shoot body parts off of people has always been weirdly comforting to Clint, and it loosens something in his chest enough so that he can say, "Okay — yeah. Let's — go find Natasha."

Coulson smiles back at him. "Let's go, then."

Outside the Duplo room, Coulson's plane looks like Air Force once, which Clint knows about a lot both because once they caught short straw and got smuggled in for Secret Service duty and because Nat has a gross old man crush on President Han Solo. She's made him watch that movie like 25 times. The plane is expensive and nice, with the oppressive quietness of heavy materials and careful construction, of no expense spared. It's also weirdly deserted for a relatively small space, so Clint figures this is a sign that everybody involved in this shitshow is gathered somewhere holding each other at gunpoint. 

"Nice plane," Clint says stupidly. 

Coulson reaches up, runs a hand down one of the paneled walls of the plane. He grins. "The Bus — she's all right."

Clint is busy processing that and wrinkling his nose because _Busmonitor_ , when they cross some threshold and come across a glassed room overflowing with angry Avengers and secret agents. There doesn't appear to be any blood flowing and the safety on everybody's gun still looks engaged so the situation is significantly less terrible than Clint had anticipated.

Coulson pushes open the door, and by way of introduction, he points his way across the huddle of new people, clustered close together and slightly behind Mei, who looks even more like cold murder than the last time Clint saw her, three years ago.

"Agent Barton, this is Jemma Simmons — " a girl nerd with a shirt buttoned up all the way waves, nervous " — Leo Fitz — " a boy nerd next to her waves, too " — Mei, you know — " Mei doesn't wave. Mei doesn't blink " — and Skye." 

A girl who looks like she fell out of an Urban Outfitters tips her chin up at him. "Hey."

Clint says, "Sup," because okay, sure, why not. 

There's a long-suffering sigh from the far corner. "Don't — don't get along," a man says, and when Clint slants his gaze over, he sees it's the asshole who shot him. 

"And that would be Specialist Grant Ward," Coulson says, sounding fucking fond, which reminds Clint he's pissed all over again.

"Thanks for shooting me with a ray gun, asshole," Clint snaps at him.

Ward, who looks like he should be folding himself into a pink plastic convertible except for how he's strapped down with like, 16 fucking guns, says, "You _stabbed the plane_."

"It's been a very trying few weeks," Natasha cuts in, her voice so even it's unsettling. 

"And also, up until like, 48 hours ago, we thought you were dead," Tony says to Coulson. His armor's been folded up into a briefcase again, chained to his wrist like the military passes nuclear launch codes. The Iron Man armor's arguably more dangerous. "Pepper made me to go _Olive Garden_ because of you — I bought a park. I commissioned a _bust_."

Coulson looks neither surprised nor moved. "Up until Clint decided to jump out of your plane and stab mine, I was _supposed_ to be dead, Stark."

"You have a funny definition of dead, Agent Coulson," says Steve, who's been quietly brooding in a corner up until now. "And that's coming from me."

Horribly, Coulson actually _blushes_ , and Clint takes the opportunity to catch Natasha's eyes and stage whisper, "This fucking plane is called _The Bus_ ," and because she's the greatest love of his life, she gives Coulson her most revolted look and says, " _Nerd_."

"Agent Ward's still armed," Coulson warns them, too embarrassed for mildness.

"He's also so, _so_ trigger happy," Urban Outfitters tells them. "We haven't let him kill anybody in like 18 hours."

Clint repeats, "He _shot me_ , with a _ray gun_."

"Yes," Skye retorts, drawing out the syllable. "Which you're still alive to complain about."

Specialist Murdering Ken Doll continues to look unmoved.

"None of this is addressing how Agent Coulson is alive," Steve reminds the room at large, and he favors them all with his Disapproving Captain America look, which Clint hasn't seen in action in months now. It's super effective, and it eventually lands on Coulson again, who is clearly fighting some costly internal struggle against a nerd orgasm that Steve Rogers is frowning at him — him! Clint's read Coulson's entire fucking Cap nerd forum. He's like a profiler. He knows how they think now. 

Coulson takes a long moment to collect himself, tucking away his tells and smoothing the line of his tie down his chest, before he says, "It's a long and shockingly uninteresting story — one I'd like to tell Agents Barton and Romanoff first." 

"Bullshit," Tony says, reflexive. "Our superhero boyband wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for my jet." 

Mei, whose selective hearing is second to none, says to Coulson, "Your office?"

He nods. "Thank you — and if you could…?"

She just cocks an eyebrow at him and cracks her knuckles. Clint is horrified to realize it still leaves him equal parts scared and half-hard in his pants. This is the worst — for so many different reasons, too.

And then all that's left is Coulson looking at Natasha, looking at Clint, and saying in that voice he uses to bring people in from the cold:

"Agents, if you'd follow me." 

*** 

There's a lot of stuff fighting for Clint's attention when Coulson ushers them into his office: Tony starting shit downstairs, Natasha's perfectly blank expression of crippling unhappiness, the fact that Clint is like, _less than ten feet away from Coulson's bed_. So once Coulson closes the door to his office _(slash bedroom)_ , Clint just stares at the floor so he doesn't stare at the pillows, the sheets, the hospital corners like a pervert. This goes on long enough that Coulson says:

"I'm surprised neither of you hit me, to be honest." 

"Clint's too in love with you to hit you," Nat says, because she's a fucking _monster_. 

Coulson slants a look over at Clint, who finds himself stuttering, " _That…._ is not true," with such a complete lack of conviction that he wishes that instead of his boomerang arrow and electric shock arrow he'd packed some kind of _tunneling_ arrow so he can burrow to the center of the earth and incinerate himself out of this lifetime.

Nat just goes on, saying, "And I'm not confident in my ability to pull my punch enough so that a fragment of your shattered skull wouldn't — "

Coulson holds up a hand, his expression a cross between affection and a grimace. "Thank you, Natasha."

"You've always liked comprehensive reports," she says, baring her teeth. 

"Yes," Coulson allows, and looking away from them, he murmurs, "and I owe one to both of you now, too."

He goes to the desk, and the way Coulson moves in his own spaces, how he navigates corners and how his hands shuffle through papers, the way Coulson lowers his head when he's considering how to start a difficult conversation — these things are as unchanging as universal measures. 

"I don't remember much immediately after Loki — " Coulson grimaces " — _stabbed_ me. I was told I was secreted away to a eyes-only SHIELD facility after being stabilized and was subsequently subjected to various surgeries and semi-experimental treatments."

"The photos show you dead," Natasha says to him. "For more than a few seconds on an operating table, even."

Coulson's smile is wry. "I know that _now_."

Clint feels his eyes widen. "They didn't tell you," he says.

"They told me I was sent to recuperate in Tahiti," Coulson says, and slumps down into his desk chair, his hands folded in his lap and looking at some point on the floor between the shined toes of his Italian leather shoes. "I have memories, foggy ones, of beach huts and umbrella drinks and massage therapists who were flatteringly flattering about a creaky old man."

It's reflex that has Clint saying, "You're not old."

And Coulson looks up at him with a crooked smile that's so _affectionate_ it makes Clint shy — shyer. It makes up for the way Natasha's staring at Clint like he's an embarrassment and she's embarrassed to know him. That's fine. He can Coulson can be embarrassing together.

"But I felt...different," Coulson says eventually, forming the last word like the nonspecific descriptors is frustrating him. When he talks again, there's something agitated in his voice; Clint and Natasha are cued into that particular tone, into the way it betrays shit going sideways and ops shortly hitting full FUBAR. "I felt like there was something wrong — more wrong than the usual discomfort of recovery."

Natasha says, "You started digging," like she both understands and is sorry she does.

"My files were sealed — to me — by order of the director of SHIELD," Coulson replies, too casual. "Some Level 1 was nice enough to offer to forward my request to Fury's office and have them circle back with me in the standard five to ten business days."

Coulson reaches into his desk and pulls out a manila folder. When he opens it for Clint and Natasha, it's more of the same they'd seen from the file in White Plains: Coulson's dead body in the images while his living body and his living fingers touch the edges of the photographs, the redacted documents. 

"I pulled some strings. I appealed to Melinda's sympathy," he says, and his thumb is sweeping back and forth over the gruesome split of bone and flesh that Loki's spear had left behind in dead Phil Coulson's chest. Just looking at it makes Clint sick. "I _was_ dead. They brought me back. I just don't know how, or even when. I remember Tahiti, but there's no evidence I was ever really there, and when I was kidnapped by Centipede — "

"What," Clint asks.

" — their ministrations knocked loose a few visuals," Coulson presses on. "That beach hut became an operating theater, and the flatteringly flattering masseuse became a surgeon. I — well. From what I can remember I didn't want to be revived."

There's a universe trapped in the grammar of that sentence, Clint thinks, dizzy with worry, and he reaches out for no good reason, closes his fingers around the edge of Coulson's desk. There are papers and antiques and Coulson's Howling Commandos relics arrayed with care here, framing the photographs spilling out of their manilla folder, and Clint looks at them like the careful wards that temple priests used to put around the dangerous and mystic. 

"That doesn't explain why you didn't tell us," Natasha says here. _You should have told us_ , is what she means. _We would have helped you_ , is what she wants Coulson to know.

From his smile, he does.  

"You'd become Avengers — you had other things to worry about. I didn't want you to lose focus," he says, in a tone that telegraphs he knows how bullshit this is. Through it all, Natasha's silence becomes increasingly oppressive and exponentially more dangerous. It's a credit to Coulson's testicular fortitude that he keeps talking instead of crossing his legs or running away or begging Natasha to stop looking at him like that. "And fairly or not, I wish you still didn't know."

Clint hears, "What, did you worry we'd embarrass you in front of your new team?" and for a few seconds he almost convinces himself he'd only said it in his head. Then Coulson says: 

"You and Natasha would do anything within your considerable power to save me, even if you shouldn't," Coulson tells them, blunt. "My new team isn't so attached. I trust them to do the right thing."

It takes Clint a beat, two beats too long to process that, because Natasha's already catapulted blank staring and horror into fiery anger.

"Is that what the fucking _Cavalry_ is for?" she spits at him. "To put you down?"  

Coulson's mouth tightens. "That's what Ward is for," he says, honest in this at least. "And Melinda hates that nickname." 

"Maybe I hate being called Black Widow," Nat retorts, vicious. "We wear what we bought and paid for." 

"We wouldn't have to put you down," Clint cuts in, stumbling at the end. 

Clint's not dumb enough to believe in love at first sight, but he'd caught Natasha's eyes and hadn't been able to pull the trigger on her. Years and years before that, Coulson had arched an eyebrow at him, crooked a smile at him, and the thought of either of their faces — the way Clint would know them by touch alone, the way they've shaped his years and days and individual hours — at the end of his arrows or the sight of his rifle makes something in his stomach turn. 

When Coulson says, "I wouldn't have wanted you to have to make that choice, Clint," it's said so kindly that it makes it worse, that it makes everything worse.

Coulson means it: his soft touch has always been a field liability and his greatest asset. Clint thinks he knows how this conversation went in Coulson's head, as he turned over the possibilities and angles. He could tell Strike Team Delta, but that would involve Delta; Nat and Clint didn't need extraction plans or handholding, but theylove Coulson, as well as people like them can love people like Coulson. He's always been the constant in the ever-changing formula for balancing their books. 

Clint knows he's always been worse about it, more given to clinging and childish acting out — rough edges the Red Room had filed off of Nat before she'd hit double digits. But even with months of mourning, Clint is less struggling to reconcile the falsehood of Coulson's death than fighting the reality that he wants to stay gone. Clint hasn't even filed an after-action on Loki yet, not a real one — there is a lot Clint needs to tell him. 

The rest of the conversation's not much better than the first part, and the more Clint listens to Nat and Coulson argue if the question marks around his return justify his subsequent course of action, the more Clint just wants to be able to fast-forward to the end. To the part where they convince him Clint's not too in love with him to hit him in the face. To the part where they decide all of this is really pretty dumb, and Natasha takes him by charm offensive or actual malice back to New York City, where Coulson has an account at Midtown Comics and so much unfinished business. To the part where Clint says, "Hey, so who's Pam?" and Coulson says, "She's not important, Clint. You're important. You and Natasha."

"Why do you think it's bad?" Clint asks suddenly, listens to the crackle in his voice that's his heart on the fritz. "What brought you back? Why would it have to be bad?"

And here the brittle, solemn lines of Coulson's face break finally. He looks older. He looks tired. He looks like he's had this argument with himself before.

Coulson hesitates, and Clint seizes that momentary weakness to say, to insist in a rush, "You coming back is good."

But Coulson doesn't make that face like Clint's unbending stubbornness is winning him over. He just keeps looking worn down. He says, "We don't know how I got here." 

"Just come back," Natasha says. "We can figure this out."

"It — wasn't good," Coulson says finally, after the silence has extended out between them for years, "What I remember — it wasn't good."

He looks between them, between Clint and Natasha, and he looks tired and hurt.

"And I can't risk it," he finishes, a rasp in his voice now, too. "I just can't risk it."

It's a fraught moment, one that hangs suspended there, and Clint thinks he could live inside of it forever — except then the intercom on Coulson's desk jangles and Secret Agent Ken Doll says: 

"Sir, if you want me to keep these assholes down here any longer, I'm going to have to resort to terminal force."

*** 

Apparently the threat of certain death at the hands of Ward and Mei isn't sufficient to keep the Avengers from complaining loudly and at length about being left out. It's terrible not just because it gets Coulson's hackles up and they have to go down to the belly of the jet again. Natasha laces her fingers with Clint's, and he is reminded bitterly of why groupwork is terrible. 

"I'm doing good work here, with my team," Coulson says, which, according to Stark's face, is zero percent convincing. "A mobile unit was something we'd always wanted to have established for SHIELD."

Stark waves away the words. "That's all ninja spy politics, which I don't care about," he reminds everybody. "What _I_ care about is why you and God damn Spy Daddy let us all think you were worm food this long."

"Well, you know, you bought a park, commissioned a bust and went to Olive Garden. How terrible for it all to go to waste," Coulson deadpans, and as Stark turns a color of red not found in nature, Coulson asks Steve, "How did you get wind of me, anyway?"

"Oh," Steve says, either unnaturally good natured or a fucking incredible troll, "you can thank Clint for that. He read your entire Howling Commandoes forum." 

Coulson sounds faint. He says, "I see."

"Well you know, JARVIS," Clint says. "And _busmonitor_. And I mean — " _oh shit_ , his brain thinks, even as his mouth is already moving " — _Pam_ and stuff."

Together, the nerds on Coulson's new team say, " _Pam?_ " like they've scented blood.

Coulson ignores them all. With impressive dignity, he says, "I guess I should say I'm proud of your thoroughness."

"But seriously, why," Stark presses, with a manic urgency that makes his hair and eyes both look crazier. "What's the point? Why would you bother? Fury's a dick, I get it. Maybe he wanted to use emotional manipulation to get me and Mr. Freeze here to get along and save us from near-certain death and possible alien enslavement — but after? Afterward, you could have popped out of some recently un-deaded closet and read us in. You could have spared me the indignity of white wine spritzers at Olive Garden." 

"Presuming to know why Director Fury does anything is always a mistake," Coulson replies, and squaring his shoulders, he adds, "And frankly we were trying to avoid just this type of situation."

Stark stares like he's not registering the clusterfuck of people on a highly classified SHIELD jet, the intelligence nightmare and crossover risk. 

"So, what, you stayed dead because it was easier?" Steve asks.

"Less complicated," Coulson corrects, and assiduously does not look at Clint or Natasha.

"Wow, just, _wow_ ," Tony says. "Initially I said that Bruce was just being a buzzkill by not being part of this recon mission but I'm starting to realize his paranoia about going jolly green out here was apparently valid."

Urban Outfitters takes this moment to look up from her laptop and declare, "By the way? There are like six Pams who work for SHIELD. None of them are under 60." 

"He could be into older ladies," the boy nerd pipes up in a familiar Scottish accent. "He could be like War _argh_ — "

The girl nerd removes her elbow from his sternum and smiles serenely.  

"So you're okay with this," Steve barrels on to Coulson, eyes on the prize, focused on the mission Captain America style. "You'd just stay out here on your plane — give it all up?"

"Captain Rogers, I was brought back from the dead," Coulson tells him, so painfully sincere that Clint hates Steve all over again. "It was...unsettling. Do you really blame me for wanting a little distance?" 

Steve cracks a grin at that. "Well, when you put it that way," he allows.

"Maybe Pam is a nickname," Urban Outfitters is mumbling at herself.

"The only thing Pam is a nickname for is Pamela. Or Pam," Ken Doll mutters.  

Clint looks at Coulson's new crew and wants to shout at them that they should shut the fuck up with their smug fucking faces — do they know Coulson's only staying because he thinks they'd take him out? Because Coulson knows Clint and Natasha too well to believe that they'd make the same call here, that they wouldn't just secret whatever Coulson became to a series of safe houses, risk everything and everybody on the dimmest of hopes. Crazy, mission-driven personalities that struggle to form relationships have equal difficulty letting go after they do. 

"So while I apologize for the subterfuge, I'm not sorry about what I'm doing," Coulson tells them, and — looking over to Clint and Natasha — he says more quietly, "Or that I intend to keep doing it." 

Natasha says something _disgusting_ in Hungarian at him; Steve looks horrified.  

Stark starts snapping his fingers. "Translate — Capsicle, translate that," he demands. 

" _That_ was unrepeatable," Steve assures him, favoring Natasha with an expression that is torn between awe and revulsion. Nat loves getting that look. She also loves trolling people into getting that look by accident; Coulson used to say it was Clint's own fault he got slapped so much during Eastern European ops because he ought to know better than to use Natasha's suggested translations for anything.

"Nice, Agent Romanoff," Coulson says, and turning back to Stark, he adds, "But this would be a good time to get suspicious."

Stark stops snapping long enough to scoff, "Of SHIELD? Because been there and done that, Agent Agent."

"Of everything, Stark," Coulson answers, ominous and too cryptic, but Tony seems to get it, because he just says, "Right," like that meant something.

And when Coulson opens his mouth again, Clint knows with absolute certainty that they're about to be dismissed, that Coulson's about to let his team kick the Avengers off his Bus. Knifed jet or not, they're going to leave, and everything still balled up in Clint's throat will still be balled up in Clint's throat when they leave him on the runway. 

If Coulson has a chance to get his composure again, to cover up that sliver of vulnerability, then maybe it will always be like this: uncertain, off center, wrong-footed. Clint is okay with being disappointed, with realizing he's fucked up. He's used to being scared and pissed. But he's starting to think he deserves better than to live with this uncertainty, to let his time and the bleeding gut wound he carries around trail off like an unfinished sentence.

Bartons are bad fucking news. They've got dowsing rods for dumb decisions, and in the whole sorry history of his life Clint's made maybe four, at most five good calls: he turned himself in to SHIELD, he ignored the kill order on Natasha, he got himself a Katie-Kate, he got a dog. Clint's never been sure the entire time he's been in love with Coulson if it was the underlying foundation of the good he does or the biggest fuck up of all. If Coulson leaves him here, maybe Clint will never know.  

It must show on his face like a beacon or a fire, because Natasha squeezes his hand for his attention. When he turns to her, she's smiling. Clint doesn't know how he got so lucky, how he got it so good, that he — Clinton Francis Aww Coffee Barton — has someone like Nat who will wink at him and whisper, "It's okay, just do it."

"And now, I think it's long past time for you guys to vacate the Bus," Coulson says out loud, and over the sound of Stark's reflexive snotty comment and Steve's reasoned argument and Urban Outfitters asking, "Wait, AC, do you watch _The Office?_ " Clint says, loud and clear and with no tremble in his voice:

"I'm staying with you, sir."

*** 

Scuttlebutt at SHIELD has generated some tremendous ur-stories for Delta. 

Clint's not-real-heroic refusal to shoot Nat on sight has, over time, transmogrified into something wild, with lashing rain and lightning arcing across the sky, something something about Natasha's vulnerable, trembling red mouth or whatever. Clint's intimately familiar with Natasha's vulnerable, trembling, red-mouthed mojo when she's pulling one over on rich dudes; she did not bother to do that with him. Nat likes the NC-17 rated versions, where she and Clint had done acrobatic and gross stuff to each other while declaring their forever love.  

That's at least — if completely wrong — a little true.

The stories about Clint and how he joined SHIELD are in another league of fucking wrong. There's the one about Clint getting hired to cross off Nick Fury and getting his knees shot out by Coulson, how his fragile desperation for belonging had touched something inside Coulson's robot programming (no). There's the one where Clint's sleek kills had leapfrogged him to the top of the most-wanted list for SHIELD, and how Coulson had chased him down across the world, lots of fancy cars and near misses, glib sass (so much no). There's the one where he's a hooker and gets requisitioned for an op (guys, come on). Clint is 99 percent sure Sitwell started that one. 

When Clint was dragged kicking and screaming, clawing at the ground, into SHIELD forever ago, Phil Coulson was already a functional necessity at the highest operational levels. People used to tell each other One Time Those Assholes stories in the hallways at the SHIELD Academy about whatever fucked up batshit stuff Nick Fury and his skim milk shadow had gotten up to that week. As far as Clint was concerned, Coulson was a ghost, a nerd's wet dream of pencil pusher turned badass, and he hadn't thought much about it beyond thinking the whole agency was bugfuck.

He'd worked his way up from security clearance Level Scum ("Level 0s are not scum, Barton," Soleymani used to tell him, bleakly hopeless about his long term prospects) to Level 2, and another two years after that, Level 3. The 2-3 jump is one of the biggest at SHIELD — 2s pull domestic detail, are assigned regionally if they're junior, transcontinentally if they're senior. Once you hit 3, they give you your wings. Clint figures if SHIELD gave you frequent flyer miles, then he would have free first class flights for the rest of his life with how many military transpos they put him on in that first year as an L3. A lot of it's a blur of, "Barton, get on the plane at 0400 — we need you to shoot someone in _blarghgistan_." Or, "Barton, get on the plane at 0200 — we need you to probably not shoot someone in _blarghgistan_ , but we need you to sit out in the 120 degree heat or -30 cold for like, eight hours until we make a call." It sucked, but at least now he was killing terrorists instead of waiting for their checks to clear. So.

They could have and might have crossed paths on two dozen overseas ops, that shitshow Melinda Mei had been in that got her called the Cavalry forever and ever amen, one of a hundred diplomatic escorts. They could have been introduced at a pre-op briefing, Coulson handing out his meticulous prep notes and slanting Clint that _grin_ of his. 

Actually, Clint had met Coulson for the first time during a fire drill.  

He remembers sitting at a desk 14th floor someone had told him was his for paperwork, trying to fill out paperwork but mostly staring out the windows at one of those soaking downpours New York gets sometimes. His ribs hurt from a thing, and he'd fucked up his knee (just a little) on his last op, so the humidity was making him one giant ache. He'd been remembering being homeless during this sort of fucking weather, and how much it sucked, when the lights and alarms went off throughout the building.

Other specialists had popped their heads up in the cube farm, "you're shitting me," clearly written across their faces, until the deputy fire warden for the floor — _Melinda fucking Mei_ — had shouted, "Hey, shitheads, get moving!" 

It was a God damn fire evacuation, so the elevators were out, and Clint's mood was just _awesome_ after limping down 14 flights of stairs into the summer monsoon chucking it down over Times Square — the armpit of New York City. Less than 30 seconds outside of the building his hair was pasted to his face, he was fucking freezing, the status of his ribs had gone from "bugging me" to "aw fuck this," and his knee was threatening to crap out any second.

He'd been trying to scrub the pigeon-flavored rainwater out of his face when the constant tattoo of it on his skull, in his shorn hair, had stopped. Clint had dropped his hand and stared stupidly at his soaked boats and the way there was a haloed absence of precipitation around him for embarrassingly long before he thought, _umbrella_ , and noticed the sensation of someone — body warm — next to him. 

The first time Clint sees Coulson in person, it is embarrassing. It is a D-grade romcom, a contemporary romance novel from Avon and subsequently Natasha's apartment. It is raining in New York City, and Coulson's holding a black umbrella over Clint's head in the downpour, slanting Clint that _grin_ of his.

He'd been in a dark suit and dark tie and a white shirt dappled by rain. It would take a lot more looking before Clint would start recognizing the expensive stitching, the heavy silk of the ties, the narrow, colored pinstripes of Coulson's shirts. That day he'd just been a plain-faced older man in a G-man costume holding an umbrella, and Clint had barely seen any of that for sucker punch of his eyes, how crooked his smile. Clint can't explain how he doesn't remember anything handsome or specific about Coulson, and yet knows all at once, too, that the moment had left a mark on him, a handprint in wet cement.

Clint thinks he mumbled something like thanks, but he knows for sure that Coulson had said, "Agent Barton." 

This next part, he remembers real clearly, because Clint had said, "Uh, and who the fuck are you?" because he was still pretty feral back then.

The guy had let out a little huff — it'd take another year for Clint to identify it as a laugh.  

"Charming," he'd said, and looking away, added, "Also I'm guessing you haven't picked up your next set of operational orders yet." 

Clint had looked left and right to see who was listening, but they'd been banked in by SHIELD agents: field specialists in black jeans and tac shirts, admin agents in off-the-rack suits, most of them looking pissed and bored and extremely fucking wet. Tucked shoulder to shoulder under the umbrella, it feels like they're apart, partitioned from the push and shove of Times Square, of their coworkers.

Clint's never been quippy or fast; he was even worse back then. He'd said, "Are you being serious with me right now?" as the rain had slows to a mist. 

Coulson's only answer had been to stick out a hand to gauge the potential damage to his suit before folding up the umbrella — and wasn't it funny, that underneath it they'd been alone, and without it they were in a crowd — and said, already walking away, "I'll see you in the briefing room tomorrow, Barton."

The next day, Clint meets Level 6 Senior Supervising Agent Philip J. Coulson. He slides a mission packet across the briefing room table Clint's sharing with with a half-dozen Level 3s, and Clint looks up from the neatly trimmed nails to the familiar watch, a pale shirt cuff and a navy jacket on a long arm leading up to the plain face and the slate blue eyes from the day before.

The mission's in Hong Kong, and after the rundown, Clint lurks around the briefing room until everybody else filters out. Coulson's got a grin on his face when Clint slouches up to him and says, "So — Coulson, huh." 

And Coulson had offered his hand. "A pleasure to meet you, Barton — I look forward to working with you."

Clint had pressed their palms together, and had felt something cautious, something shy, something cupped in two hands, begin to flicker in his chest.

***

So after all the reflexive shouting dies down, after Coulson corrals him off to stare into Clint's face like he's stricken with something tantalizingly like hope, it's easy for Clint to take his hand again. This time it's just Clint's rough fingers and rough palms, scraping over Coulson's narrower digits, his thicker palm, feeling the muscle and bone and the faint thud of Coulson's heart pumping Coulson's blood through the delta of his wrist.  

"Clint, you don't have to do this," Coulson says, noble to the last, perfectly level, but he's clutching at Clint's fingers as desperately as Clint's clutching at his.

Clint's terrible at words, but he's good at this, great at reading the warmth of Coulson's hands, so it's easy to smile, to know to say, "I want to — I want this," and feel Coulson's answer in the touch of fingers, the thrumming of his pulse.

 


	7. Epilogue

**Howling Commandoes HQ > Home > Forums **   
 **!!! IMPORTANT !!! 'BUSMONITOR' SITUATION  
** (Sticky) Posted by Bucky1956 on February 10, 2014

I'm going to flagrantly plagiarize  _due_ South here and say, for reasons that don't bear further exploration at this juncture, it's come to our attention that in a post-Battle of New York world we've gone full comic book logic. Our faithful and presumed deceased leader, PC, who we all mourned (some of us a LOT, PHIL), is apparently not dead, and has — like a troll — been hanging around this forum under the moniker 'busmonitor.' 

PC has made a number of attempts to justify this soap opera level bullshit under the banner of national security, but I took an informal vote in the mod channel and we've decided that is hot bottled garbage. 

Pursuant to this, PC is banned hereby, forthwith, and until we stop being pissed. Which does not seem to be anytime soon because I CASHED OUT MY FREQUENT FLYER MILES, PHIL. GOD YOU FUCKING DICK.

*** 

To: Buck (bucky1956@yahoo.com); DumDum (dumdeedumdum@gmail.com)  
From: PC (loyaltothedream@hushmail.com)  
Subject: Guys, come on

While I completely understand your feelings of anger and recognize that — without context because it is classified — this was all extremely upsetting, you have to admit that it has been several months and it's extremely petty and childish to continue banning me  _from_   _my own forum._

And if you two persist on banning me  _from my own forum_ , can you please at least handle the rapidly shitspiralling historical debate thread? There is a doge meme in there.  

PC. 

***

To: PC (loyaltothedream@hushmail.com)  
Cc: DumDum (dumdeedumdum@gmail.com)  
From: (bucky1956@yahoo.com)  
Subject: Re: Guys, come on

Good job totally failing to even pretend to be sorry about this you giant fuckstick. You big stick of fucks. What the fuck, man. We really thought you were dead. Dave fucking wrote Captain America about your dumb ass Jesus Christ did you  _fake your death with Cap, too?_ You mother fucker.

***

**Howling Commandoes HQ > Home > Forums **   
**!!! 2014 Banned List !!! (Updated)**   
(Sticky) Posted by Bucky1956 on May 2, 2014

CatchEmAll67 (conduct)  
6969ballz (conduct)  
ClevelandRocks23 (conduct)  
busmonitor (FOR FAKING HIS DEATH)  
pinstripes (DUMDUM CRIED OVER YOU)  
halfwindsor (SCYTHELORD'S DOG IS TRAUMATIZED BECAUSE OF YOU)  
JC (We know your middle name, too, asshole)  
pussy_riot (excessive posting)  
regionalmgmt (Phil we figured out your over-identification with The Office when you started calling the guy you had a crush on at work  _Pam_ )  
arrow_dipped_in_bl00d (underage)  
getl0wh0 (conduct; excessive posting)  
supernanny (Nobody admits to watching that show other than you, Coulson)  
capsicoul (Phil, just stop)  
pencilpusher (Phil, no)  
itwasfornationalsecurity (nope)

***

Brad Howell (425-887-9122):  
motherFUCKER

David Lesinski (919-412-8434):  
???

Brad Howell (425-887-9122):  
that asshole just mailed me back the fucking mug he ebay sniped from me

Brad Howell (425-887-9122):  
did he send you anything??

Brad Howell (425-887-9122):  
he's resorting to bribery and I'm not a strong man, Lesinski

David Lesinski (919-412-8434):

……………..so I am suddenly more motivated to go pick up the package that the mail room says they're holding for me brb

David Lesinski (919-412-8434):  
SCREAM ITS A REPLICA CAP SHIELD THAT'S SIGNED SCREAM

Brad Howell (425-887-9122):  
shitfuck god damn

***

Barton (withheld):  
dude

Steven G. Rogers (withheld):   
Hi Clint

Barton (withheld):   
are you giving coulson cap shit to bribe his creepy forum friends with?

Steven G. Rogers (withheld):   
...No? 

Barton (withheld):  
…. 

Barton (withheld):  
……………………

Barton (withheld):  
……………………….!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Barton (withheld):  
oh my god what a fucking freak steve i think he can forge your signature. 

Barton (withheld):  
like PERFECTLY

Steven G. Rogers (withheld):   
I don't even want to know. 

Steven G. Rogers (withheld):   
How is the jet? And the team? 

Barton (withheld):  
there's something wrong with ward and katie kate stole my dog and ran off to la

Barton (withheld):  
but otherwise it's good

Barton (withheld):  
it's really good

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many, many thanks to Leupagus, who is the abracadabra behind every rabbit I have stuffed into a top hat. 
> 
> Also, to shame her:
> 
> Leupagus: lord help me but I'm about to correct a spelling error, it's actually doge  
> Pru: …thank you.  
> Pru: not only is it a spelling error  
> Leupagus: I feel so unclean  
> Pru: it was DOGE

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Track This Thread [Podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041592) by [paraka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraka/pseuds/paraka)




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